The other day, whilst watching an episode of Ninja Warrior, I made mention that the entire commentary is in Japanese, except for a few English words thrown in. Typically the name of the obstacle the contestant is on, e.g. "Spider Walk" or "Pipe Slider". My brother commented that in Japan, they don’t have a lot of Japanese words for newly invented things, e.g. the word for "Computer" is Computer.

This made no sense as I think Spiders have been around for a while, and I’m fairly certain folks can Walk in Japan.

This got me thinking…

The names of many towns in Ireland are anglo-cised versions of the original Gaelic. The most famous example being Dublin which was originally named "Dubh Linn" which translated means Black Pool.

It occurs to me that the reverse must’ve also happened based on the similarity of many Gaelic words to their English counterpart. For example, the Irish for coat is "cota", the Irish for hat is "hata", the Irish for pepper is "piobar". So what happened? Did my ancestors have a different word for these things that got dropped?

Did they not wear coats or hats? Did they only have salt and no pepper?