Obama in Ireland: The Yes We Can in Irish T-shirt
I took this photo of an Obama t-shirt as Gaeilge (in Irish) in town - Dublin - a couple of days ago.
When I lived in America I got very tired explaining to people who wanted literal translations that languages don’t work that way, to which the response was yeah, yeah, yeah, before embarrassingly inaccurate Irish would appear on websites, posters, t-shirts and signs. So I gave up.
This t-shirt says:
Sea, Is Féidir and it means to be a translation of the Obama campaign slogan “Yes, We Can”.
And above that is an attempt to make Obama’s name seem Irish by, and I like this bit on an Irish language t-shirt, anglicizing it. If it was being Gaelicized it would be Ó Bama meaning literally ‘grandson/descendant of the non-existent Bama’. The O’Bama is what the English visitors did to Irish names because it they didn’t do those funny marks we put over vowels at certain times. I’ve seen genealogists write names beginning O’ on documents purporting to be in Irish (Gaelic) - you might want to question them when you see them do it.
A couple of things about “Yes, We Can” in Irish.
“We can” typically would be Is Féidir Linn - the ‘Linn’ bit being the first person plural which is absent from the t-shirt. Is Féidir without the ‘Linn’ means “It’s Possible”. Or it could be “We can” - if the ‘we’ is implied. If someone asked “Can we?” (think of it as ‘Is it possible for us [to do it]?) then the answer is Is Féidir (”It’s possible”) would therefore imply it’s possible for us, indeed, yes, it’s possible for us. Which is the same as “(yes,) we can”.
There is no literal translation for the word “Yes” in Irish. “Yes” is expressed through saying the positive form of a verb e.g. I do, It is, She understands, etc. As written here Sea (pronounced ’shah’) and sometime ’sea is a contraction of Is ea and is one of the 2 forms of how you say the verb “to be” in Irish, the one that expresses identification or classification - as opposed to the one that expresses a state or condition.
So all in all that means, who knows, but we do know that they mean it to be the equivalent of “Yes, We can” - just don’t go telling your friends it literally means that, because the chances are they’re not your friends.
Here is President Obama himself, due in Ireland tomorrow, saying those very words in Irish. Well, saying Is Féidir Linn
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