surf-matic

This was our humble Easkey cottage.

A short Irish interlude for today:

The amazing people at google have fleshed out the streets of rural northwest Ireland. So I’d like to post a few photos here snagged from google maps in order to illustrate a bit more of my Irish trip.

Tractors are a very valid form of transport.

The Irish, of course, speak English. But while there I felt like I didn’t speak the language. The expressions, phrases, and accents are so unique that understanding (for my american ear) requires full concentration.

Speaking of language, there is an amazing wikipedia page for “loanword“. Here is the first half of the first paragraph:

A loanword (or loan word) is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,[1] while calque is a loanword from French. The terms borrow and loanword, although traditional, conflict with the ordinary meaning of those words because nothing is returned to the donor languages.[2] However, note that this metaphor is not isolated to the concept of loanwords, but also found in the idiom “to borrow an idea.”

The famous Fisherman's Weir. Web definition of weir: "An enclosure of stakes set in a stream as a trap for fish"

The beauty of Ireland-- dark clouds against rich green fields.