Does "asdó" mean anything to anyone?

The context (MSF, chapter 19) is:

quote:

Do stad sé ar feadh tamaill agus iongnadh air.
Ansan: "Asdó, a Athair," ar seisean, "caithim-se
bheith amuich sa n-oídhche fé fhuacht agus fé fhliuchra, agus do raghadh an fuacht tré m' chroídhe dá mba ná h-ólfainn braon biotáile nó braon de rud éigin teith mar
sin."

Asdó, a Athair is translated by Sheila Sullivan as "Ah, Father". But I can't find anything like it in any dictionary.

Does anyone recognise the word "an barrac"?

agus ó-thuaidh go dtí an barrac,mar a mbíodh an foghluidhe


The translation says "north to the uplands where the highwayman once was", but I can't find a word barrac meaning upland.

barrach is a form of barr.

Dinneen has it referrring to the tops of plants, trees etc. But the sense of uplands is clear here, I think.

I suspect "Asdó" is an interjection built up of As and dó. Where is this passage? I'd like to check what my edition has. I can't find it in Chapter XIX.

At the beginning of paragraph 5 - see http://wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Mo_sgeal_fein.djvu/152

Aonghus, what does your edition have for barrac? My edition has no lenition on the c, but a number of examples of missing lenition are found in the book, so that doesn't mean the word isn't barrach. Barrac occurs on line 8 here: http://wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Mo_sgeal_fein.djvu/154

OK, noticing that the first page of Séadna has an interjection "astóin" - spelled "is dóin" in the modern spelling edition - I now know what "asdó" means.

See p354 of Dinneen's.

Dóigh - means "hope" and other things. The Munster corruption of dóigh is dóin. Which is why "of course" can be dar ndóigh, dar nóin, ar ndóigh or ar nóin.

Is dóigh/is dóin: means "however, indeed, very good".

This was one of the hardest things to work out - you can see why standard spellings of some sort are needed - PUL used his own spellings and it is occasionally almost impossible to look the words up.

Ah. I'd say "Is dócha/dóigh" (Probably). Which would sound like "Asdó".

I'll check the book this evening. I have a feeling this anecdote is either dropped, or there are pages mixed up.

You must be right Aonghus about barrach (but please let me know tonight if that is how your edition spells it). Joyce's "Irish Names of Places" - a 19th century book available as PDF at www.archive.org - has this entry for Barragh:

Barragh in Carlow, Cavan, Leitrim, Longford; barrach, top land, upland; a derivative from barr, with the termination ach.

Elsewhere in Mo Sgéal Féin, barrac (with a c, not a ch) is used to mean "military barracks" - a word written beairic in standard Irish nowadays. But it would make no sense for a highwayman to frequent an area where there were military barracks close by....

I've come to the conclusion that the edition I have is abridged, for school use.

I can't find either passage, but I've found passages around them.

I may have another copy somewhere.

Thanks for looking! I think we resolved them anyway!