I ran into some interesting stuff fucking around on teanglann today (started because I was once again thinking about the way people pronounce síofra wrong, but we'll put that aside).
Anyway I clicked onto Saoirse, classic Irish name but obvs also the word for freedom. And what was really interesting was the other meanings it has. I didn't know this but it can also mean nobility and privilege. It makes sense when you think about it from a historical perspective, where being noble means having greater power and autonomy - I don't know which meaning came first, but both feel plausible. Either that the nobility get called free because of their privilege, or that when the language fumbles for a word for freedom, it finds analogy in hierarchical power.
Saoirse is also not the only word for the concept. There's díolúin, which means free and also exempt or immune.
And then there's neamhspleáchas, independence, and it's adjective, neamhspleách. Which rendered into English literally is heavendependent. The fócloir beag gives a particularly pleasing elaboration. "gan spleáchas le daoine eile" - without dependence on any other person, or to say it another way, dependent only on heaven.
I'm not credulous enough to buy the sapir whorf hypothesis, but I do find it lovely and beautiful what a language can encode and what it chooses to encode. The implication that one is answerable only to god tells you a lot about the Irish attitude to religion, how built in it is to the whole language and culture, and it also suggests something fascinating about that cultural conception of freedom, that no matter how loose your ties to the community, at some point you will still, inevitably, be called to account.
