In English, there is a difference between cute, beautiful, pretty, attractive and similar words. It is not simple to define what the differences are.

For example, I might say that a girl is cute instead of pretty, but it is difficult to explain why. My point is, one cannot simply say that

cute = beautiful
pretty = beautiful

Even though both a cute girl and a pretty girl may very well be beautiful.

I'm curious to know what differences there are, like these, that exist in Irish, for words used to express beauty.

Many! Also, there are a huge variety of words like spéirbhean, ainnir, bé, etc to describe many varaints of beautiful women.

There is a huge number of them, like in any other language, I suppose. Off the top of my head, there is deas, álainn, aoibhinn, gleoite, dóighiúil, scéimheach, dathúil...

There are differences between them too, but (and this is important) the differences are different to the differences between the English cute, pretty, beatiful, and so on. Neither of the Irish beauty words maps exactly onto any English word.

It's very difficult to pin down the differences between, say, deas and álainn is. One difference that occurs to me right now is that deas tends to be used to refer to a person's character as well as to their physical appearance, while álainn doesn't, or at least not as often - but that's just my opinion.

This is a huge topic, it occurs in every language, and people have written doctoral theses about it. Groups of words like these are sometimes referred to as near synonyms and they are said to be related to one another in a semantic network. If this interests you, get a book on lexical semantic and start reading - but don't expect any hard and fast answers ;-)

Okay, thanks!!

A French friend of mine out here in California says that he always uses "beautiful", because it is very generic and doesn't get him into trouble.

What practical advice do you have for using these words? Unfortunately I don't have the time to read too much about it (it does interest me, but one PhD at a time, grma!!), but I'd like to have a better grasp on the langauge.

And this comes up quite often in conversation. Often at parties I'll mention that I "know a few words" and people will ask "how do you say..."? One of the frequent requests is "You're beautiful." I always just use álainn, but now I'm wondering what, exactly, I've been saying.

Also, which of these words work for other things, such as "the mountains are very beautiful" or "The kitten is cute"?

I just think this is a nice way to expand my vocabulary...

Álainn is as safe as beautiful!

Álainn is probably the reason Irish English speakers say the meal was lovely or that soup was gorgeous. English speakers elsewhere do not use those two adjectives to refer to anything but how food looks. Or at least that's my experience. What do you think?

Be careful, basically "deas" means "nice". A woman can be "deas" but ugly !

can you say along the lines of tá tú go deas ag féachaint
for you are nice looking. or does that not make sence in Irish?

"can you say along the lines of tá tú go deas ag féachaint"?

Yes you can, just rearrange the words a little:

- Tá tú ag féachaint go deas

or

- Tá tú ag breathnú go deas

"- Tá tú ag féachaint go deas

or

- Tá tú ag breathnú go deas"

On reflection, something about the above strikes me as Béarlachas but I can't put my finger on it. Hopefully, the experts will correct me if I'm wrong.

Lughaidh, I disagree with your feelings about the word 'deas'. In the many songs as Gaeilge that refer to a 'cailín deas' I kind of doubt people are singing about the girl's lovely personality. But what do I know, so I looked up pretty in de bhaldraithe, and deas is the first answer, whereas under the nice entry it's halfway down the paragraph.

Now the word gránna which means ugly, can it not mean not nice behavior as well? Like ná bí gránna liom? Or am I just imagining that I've heard that?

Colleen

If I wanted to say "You're looking nice", I'd say:

Tá cuma dheas ort.

"Tá tú ag féachaint go deas"

Is this Béarlachas?

Is dócha gur tháinig sé isteach sa Ghaeilge faoi anáil an Bhéarla ar dtús, ach is cuid den teanga anois é.