Gàidhlig / English
Bileag

Bileag

Posted by Alasdair on 9 March 2017
It’s appropriate in a way that bileag is our word of the week.  I’m currently digitising some of the bileagan, or ‘slips’, that Professor Ronald Black produced for the Historical Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic.  On these bileagan are words and phrases from some of the oldest surviving Gaelic munuscripts.
 
Gaelic-speakers today, particularly those in the education sector, will be familiar with the term bileag in this sense: as a leaf of paper, as it were.  Indeed, this sense is recorded for bileag in Portree, Skye in the Fieldwork Archive.
 
That said, bileag carries another sense which is perhaps less frequently used today.  That’s true of the urban surroundings in which this DASG employee is currently based, at any rate, and for reasons on which I don’t really need to elaborate.  As Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (aka Mary MacPherson) comments: “ ’S ged nach faic sinn bileag fheòir // Air sràidean comhnard Ghrianaig…”.  In other words, bileag can also be applied to grass.  In Breakish in Skye, bileag is recorded in the Fieldwork Archive in a phrase used to describe the first appearance of new grass in the spring: “Bitheadh bileag a’ tighinn a mach tuilleadh”.  In Scalpay, Harris, bileag-sléibh, translated as “hill-blade of grass”, is recorded in the phrase “Cha’n eil bileag sléibh aice”, literally meaning ‘She [the sheep] doesn’t have a hill-blade of grass’.  There are several texts in Corpas na Gàidhlig in which bileag is recorded in this same sense; “bileag fheòir”, probably best translated as ‘blade of grass’, is recorded in Luach na Saorsa, for example.
 
The term’s semantic range is broader still, however.  The phrase “bileag fiogha”, ‘a bileag of wood’, is recorded in John Angus MacLeod’s Criomagan Ioma-dhathte (1973); and “bileag fuilt”, ‘a bileag of hair’, is recorded in Iain Finlay MacLeòid’s novel Na Klondykers (2005).
 
The word is also found in the Corpus in the papery sense to which I referred at the beginning of this blog, however.  For example, “bileag phaipeir”, probably best translated as ‘a leaf of paper’, is recorded in Mac-Talla, vol. XI (1902).  There are numerous other examples to compare and contrast in Corpas na Gàidhlig.
 
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