Two Mistranslations in Nicolson's Gaelic Proverbs
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A recent skim through Alexander Nicolson's Gaelic Proverbs (1881; most recent edition, 1996) has revealed two (probable) mistranslations. To suggest that further scrutiny might add to this list of corrections, is not to express any disrespect for Nicolson: as another proverb in his great collection states, Cha do shuidh air stiùir nach tàinig bho làimh uaireigin (‘No man ever held helm that did not some time lose his hold’).1 One of Nicolson's proverbs puts into the mouth of an exasperated goatherd an ultimatum directed at waverers: Gairm Mhic Mhannain air na gobhair: ‘Ma thig, thig; 's mur tig, fan’. Nicolson translates this saying as: ‘The Manxman's call to the goats: “If you are coming, come; if not, stay” ’.2 We know of no grounds for Nicolson's rendering as ‘Manxman’ the surname MacMhannain. The latter is a real, though now rare, surname of the Hebrides. The bard of Lord Selkirk's colonizing venture in Prince Edward Island, Canada, was an illiterate Skyeman named Calum Bàn MacMhannain (1758–1829), whose modern editor procured a note on the surname from the late Revd William Matheson, Reader in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh. ‘This surname’, Matheson wrote, ‘should really be spelled Mac Bhannain. In sixteenth-century records referring to Skye it appears as “mc banane,” and it may be the same name as Irish Bannon. In Skye (and also in Lewis) it is now anglicised, but misleadingly, as Buchanan. They were once an influential tribe in Arran, but their history is quite obscure’.3
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it