This is from
The Invisibles volume 1 issue 4:
"I feel a sadness on me," says Tom. "That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, 'I
am sad,' or 'I
am happy'. They understood what we English have long forgot. We're
not our sadness. We're
not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes."
I'm reminded of
Geoffrey Pullum's awesome response to a piece about how the Gaelic word
sgrìob, apparently meaning "the tingle of anticipation felt in the upper lip before drinking whisky" says something profound about Gaelic ways and priorities.
In Irish Gaelic,
tá gruaim orm translates word-for-word as "sadness is on me" (I think). Scots Gaelic does something similar:
Tha an t-acras orm translates word-for-word as "hunger is on me", that is "I'm hungry".
Dè an t-ainm a th'oirt translates word-for-word as "What (is) the name that is on you", that is, "What's your name?"
Pity us English speakers, having long forgotten something the Irish understood… except that we haven't forgotten. It's easy enough to say "I feel a sadness on me", in fact Tom himself said it! It's not hard to figure out what it means. And it's possible to find other examples:
Sadness on the soul of Ida fell. - Tennyson, The princess
sorrow and sadness sat upon every face - Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
A search for "sadness fell on me" in google books gets a number of results.
If our language traps us in little boxes, they're boxes made of tissue paper, easy to break out of.
Tom's claim that Gaelic speakers can't say "I am sad" just doesn't hold up. If it was true, it would mean that Gaelic speakers think in English, and just translate their English thoughts word-for-word into Gaelic when they talk.
tá gruaim orm translates word-for-word as "sadness is on me", but its
meaning is "I am sad".
