Re: OT: What language is this?

Sgrìobh Roger Mills:
> Appended to a recent msg I received:
> Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
As others have said, this is Scottish Gaelic (for the uninitiated, the grave
accents and the negative particle "cha" are dead giveaways). This is a proverb
which appears on page 135 of Alexander Nicholson's classic "Collection of
Gaelic Proverbs and Familiar Phrases" (first published 1881 & reprinted
numerous times; current edition published by Birlinn, ISBN 1874744149). The
literal translation is "[There] was not death of a man without grace of a man",
and the sense is, as Keith stated, that some person profits in some way from
another's death. The translation given in Nicholson is "One man's death is
grace to another", and he then gives the following equivalents in Welsh and
Manx: "Ni ddaw drwg i un, na ddaw da i arall -- Ill comes not to one without
good to another -- Welsh. Baase y derrey voddey, grayse y voddey elley -- One
dog's death, another dog's grace -- Manx." Note in the Manx an idiom I've
always found interesting, shared with Scottish Gaelic: where English says!
 "the one...the other...", Gaelic says "an dàra...an eile...", literally
"the _second_... the other...".

Thomas