A chara, – Mícheál Ó Ruairc (August 24th) cites Dinneen’s dictionary’s “blá m. (= masculine), a plain ...” and then adds “not a feminine noun” as stated by me (August 22nd).
I wonder does Mr Ó Ruairc realise that scholarship in the Irish language did not cease in 1927 with Dinneen’s magnum opus; and indeed (dare one say it?) that the great thesaurus is not altogether free of error – of which blá being masculine is, in fact, a further example.
Dinneen refers his information to three earlier dictionaries (as he usually did in the case of a word with which he was not familiar): O’Brien’s Irish-English dictionary (Paris, 1768), O’Reilly’s Irish-English dictionary (1817 etc), and Peter O’Connell’s manuscript Irish-English dictionary of 1826. Dinneen’s erroneous masculine gender designation derives from O’Reilly, it seems – the other two eschew the matter of gender here.
I recommend to Mr Ó Ruairc instead Fasciculus B (1975) of the Royal Irish Academy Dictionary of the Irish Language, compiled by eminent scholars of the language who availed of a vast array of sources.
There he will find, under lemma blá 3 the abbreviation f. (= feminine) together with the term’s denotations and copious examples of its usages historically, eg “cend na blae” (blae being an early variant form of blá), our “ceann na blá”, the head or end of the plain.
Mr Ó Ruairc, besides, is enamoured, it seems, of the mid-20th century misnomer Béal na mBláth, and urges its retention on the principle (as he puts it so elegantly himself) “if it’s not broke don’t fix it”. But it is a ghost form, and it should be banished, I suggest.
I tend to attend instead to the cry from the heart of an elderly man there, many years ago now: “Ah! Why are they changing it? What are they changing it for? Why don’t they call it Béal na Blá, what we said ever, and all our people before us?” Yes indeed! And once more with feeling! – Is mise,