I was having a gander at the Eldar 6th ed codex, and I couldn't help but notice a... trend of sorts with words italicized to indicate their being an old Eldar term. A lot of these words made sense to me in their context, but it took me a while to register why -
A whole bunch of the terms are directly taken from Gaeilge, more often known as the Irish language.
Take for instance, Faolchú is mentioned as a figure in Eldar mythology who delivered the sword of the war God Khaine to the mortal warrior Eldanesh. This is supposed to be what named the Falcon vehicles of the Eldar, and is part of that nonsense that the DOW1 falcon says every now and then:
"Just as Falcon brought Anaris to Eldanesh, we bring warriors to the front". 'Anaris' apparently being the name of the kickass sword. Faolchú is pronounced 'falcon' in this instance... but it is certainly more than a coincidence that faol and cú are both words in Irish, meaning 'wolf' and 'hound'. And it's also quite odd that they've conjugated the words together appropriately, adding a 'h' where necessary... unrelated to the concept of a falcon, but Wolfhound is certainly a good ancient warrior's name.
And again, there's mention that the Harlequins of the Eldar have a name for their weird clown outfits, or domino suits - 'dathedi'. A nice amalgamation of the Irish words for 'colour' and 'clothing', dath and eadai.
Fully convinced of the link, I went looking for more. Craftworld Saim-Hann is an interesting one. A botching up of the Irish term for Summer, 'Samhain'.
So I googled the terms, and ended up with this link: Heresy-online.net
For those unwilling/too lazy to click the link, it's a forum post by a dude with more free time than I should ever hope to have, who collated all the various 'Eldar' words he could find from old codices and Black Library publications. And the amount of stuff that corresponds with Irish... well, here's some of the more obvious ones.
'High Avatar' = Ardathair = Ard + athair = 'High father'.
'Shuriken cannon' = buanna = buanna = 'talents'. Lol.
'Pack grenade launcher' = creideann, in-lore translation = belief maker apparently. Which is fitting, as the word creideann is a present-tense conjugation of the Irish verb to believe...
'Lord-Phoenix' = Tuisich-Novasmair = Not a clue what 'novasmair' is about, but tuisich is clearly a botching up of the Irish word for leader, taoiseach, which would be pronounced similarly.
'Swooping hawks' = Fian silsperiaigh = botching up of the fianna, ancient warriors in Irish mythology, and the term for 'sky', with some added crap that I don't recognise but with a plausible Irish spelling.
My explanation for all of this? Well, I have two. One, Games Workshop is a UK-based company, and when tasked with designing a weird and ancient culture, they turned to that of their neighbours...
Two, a GW employee of Irish origin was given the task of writing some Eldar fluff and got lazy :P
Irish Eldar? Doesn't seem right, does it?
Mind you... their eventual creation of the God of Excess makes a bit more sense now...
