Agus gan trácht ar "ráig bháistí".
Pléadh an cheist seo maidir leis an tsean-teanga ar Old-Irish-L thiar i Mí an Mheithimh 2000 :
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0006&L=old-irish-l Seo agat chuid den tsnáithe:
> Only two? I'd have thought it'd be like eskimo words for snow :)
There really are not all that many of them. "Fras" and "cith",
which survive down to the present day, both meant "shower", but
of any sort: rain, snow, hail. "Díliu" (now "díle"), from
Latin "diluvium", started out referring to the biblical deluge
and only later came to mean "downpour, torrential rain". The
modern "fearthainn" is originally the verbal noun of "feraid",
as I mentioned, and modern "báisteach" apparently derives from
earlier "baitsed / baithsed / baisted" (= baptising, baptism)
which starts out as a loan from Latin.
I should note that the verb "snigid" (pours down, flows, drips)
can be used instead of "feraid" (grants, gives forth, pours) with
"flechud" and "snechta", as the following DIL attestations show:
• snigis fleochad (it rained)
• coro snig flechud mór (until/so that it rained a lot)
• snigid snechta do cech róen (it's snowing on all sides)
To further narrow the lexical field, "snechta" is an ancient
derivative of "snig-". And "flechud" is basically just an
alternate of "fliuchad" (= wetting), from "fliuch" (= wet).
None of this seems to point to a large native vocabulary of
"technical terms" specifying types or gradations of rain à
la esquimaude (which Steven Pinker, among others, has rather
debunked anyway, but let's not get off on that). The lexicon
in general, aside from the Latin-derived bits, seems to go
back to a fairly amorphous idea of precipitation in any form
showering, pouring, or dripping down, or to wetness. So,
maybe Scottish Gaelic "tha an t-uisge ann" really is truest
to the more ancient Goidelic psychology of rain! :-)
