I got the "Dialann 2006" and am happily puzzling over the weekly quotations. I couldn't make sense of the one for Seachtain 4 :
“An rógaire is caime, deineann an bás fear díreach”

The word "deineann" doesn't make sense to me (and isn't in my dictionaries). Can you help me to find out whether this is an error or else, what word it is derived of?

Go raibh maith agaibh.

Máre.

"deineann" is Munster Irish; the equivalent in standard Irish would be "déanann", which is the 3rd person present tense of "déan" (do/make).

BTW, if you had looked for "dein" in Ó Dónaill's dictionary, it would have referred you to "déan".

Thanks!

I looked for the entire word, my mistake.

So if I take "An xxx is yyy" as "The yyy-est xxx", would this translate as : "The crookedest rogue kills a straight man" ?

No.

No matter how crooked the rogue, death makes him straight.

A Scaipthe, a chara

quote:

So if I take "An xxx is yyy" as "The yyy-est xxx", would this translate as : "The crookedest rogue ..."

That part of your translation is correct, in my opinion. Where you went astray was to use "deineann an bás" as a translation of the verb "kill(s)"

maraigh = kill (verb)
an bás = death. "death" is an abstract noun so it's quite common to use the definate article with it.

Le meas,

The first part of Scaipthe's assumption is correct.
I rephrased it to make the meaning clearer.

The crookedest rogue, death makes him straight

would be a more word for word translation.

Thank you very much, all!

I'm still trying to cut up new phrases in a digestible form and first translate literally and then put some free form to it.

I hope that one day I'll be able to just read in context without translation, but "thinking in irish" is a faraway dream still :)

Máre.

Proverbs are probably not the best place to start, because they tend to rely heavily on implied words or idiomatic meanings (as happened above!)

Literal translations can be misleading then.