How To Say My Eye Is Swollen In Irish

This is not the blog that I had planned for today, but when I woke up this morning with an unexpected swollen eye I decided to embrace the opportunity to take a bitesized look at how say “my eye is swollen” in Irish, as well as some associated phrases and vocabulary.

So, this is how we say “my eye is swollen” in Irish:

Tá mo shúil ata /Thaw muh hoo-il a-tha/

We can use this sentence structure to talk about other parts of the body that might be swollen. For instance, if you should have a swollen ankle you could say:

Tá mo rúitín ata /Thaw muh roo-it-een a-tha/

Perhaps you are curious as to why my eye is swollen today, in which case you could ask “what happened to you?” . In Irish, this is:

Cad a tharla duit? /Kodh a horr-lah duh-it?/

I might answer that I was boxing:

Bhí mé ag dornálaíocht. /Vee may eg dur-nawl-ee-ukth/

This Irish word for boxing, dornálaíocht, derives from the Irish word for fist:

dorn /dur-un/

As it happens, I did didn’t get my swollen eye boxing. If i told you that had I would be telling a lie, or bréag /brr-ay-ug/.

This is how to say “to tell a lie”:

Bréag a insint /Brr-ay-uga een-shint/

The truth is that my swollen eye was caused by a mosquito bite that I received while asleep.
The way to say “a mosquito bit me ” in Irish is:

Bhain muiscít greim asam /Vwin mish-keet grym oss-um/

Literally translated this is “a mosquito took a bite out of me”.

That little word asam means “out of me”. It is the prepositional pronoun, first-person singular, relating to the preposition as /oss/, meaning “out of” or “from”.
Here is a very handy printable table of all of the prepositions in Irish and the propositional pronouns associated with them.

How would you describe a person who has a “swollen head” in Irish? Someone, say, who has a very high opinion of themselves?
There a are a few ways, but one of the most common is to say, in Irish, that that a person is “full of themselves”. Here’s how to say this about a woman:

Tá sí lán di féin /Thaw shee lawn dih fayn/
She is full of herself (i.e. bigheaded)

..and in reference to a man:

Tá sé lán de féin /Thaw shay lawn deh fayn/
He is full of himself (i.e. bigheaded)

Now, I don’t wish to sound bigheaded, but I think that this has been rather a good blog..