translates, “his swift and energetic youths and his nimble and athletic men”; but the contrast shows what is intended, which indeed is precisely what the words mean, his unsteady, unreliable troops.
Sometimes the difference is more important. On F. Mast. iii. p. 2272, O’Donovan has (unintentionally) distorted a historical fact by a mistranslation: go ro coṁairléicc an ḃainrioġain ⁊ an ċoṁairle d’Iarla tuaḋmuṁan toċt go n‑iomat long ⁊ laoiḋeng…do caḃair ⁊ do coṁḟurtaċt muintire an prionnsa i nErinn; translated thus: “until the Queen and Council advised the Earl of Thomond to go with many ships and vessels.…to relieve and succour the Sovereign’s people in Ireland”. His note in loco says: “This is a very strange verb to use. It should be ro ḟorċongair or ro ḟorail, ‘requested or ordered’”. It is certain that any historian following O’Donovan’s translation and note would altogether misconceive the Four Masters, for the verb means permitted, and has no reference either to advice or command. It is of so common occurrence in this sense that I shall not quote any examples [cf. Ml. 31c14, 32c4, 58c6, 38α11, 40d6, 44d21, 44d16, 20, 54α10, 56c7, 57c5, 53d9, &c.]. But O’Donovan has rendered the word wrongly in many places, in accordance with the misconception, e.gr. vol. iii. p. 2050, “the general permitted [ro ċedaiġ] them to frequent Leinster.…, whereupon ro battar roṁ lás an ccoṁairlecċad sin acc taistel ⁊ taṫaiġe gaċ tire ina ttimcell, “by this instruction they continued traversing and frequenting every territory around them”, instead of “through their permission”. Again, vol. i. p. 178 [sub anno 1213] “[the steward] began to wrangle with the poet very much, although his lord had given him no instructions to do so”, gion gur bo hé a ṫiccerna ro ċoṁairleicc do.
One of the most fertile sources of mistake is the confusion of root syllables under the influence of the phonetic laws of the language; thus cur, ‘to put’ and gar, ‘to speak’, when compared with the preposition frith, develop into the nominals frécor and frécre respectively. The confusion of these and related forms has led to some curious renderings, e.gr. in O’Donovan’s Suppl. to O’R. we have an entry frecor céill, ‘an exact return’, giving two quotations (from H. 3, 17, and H. 3, 18), and a reference to Zeuss ii. 1130. If we examine the use
