v1.0
Published 01/10/24
sùlaire m. [ˈs̪uːɫ̪əɾʲə]
Cf. /suːLɪrʲə/ (AFB˄).
(or sùlair, with apocope
E.g. [so:ɫəɾ] (Faclan bhon t-Sluagh˄: East Sutherland); sular (Christiansen 1938, 4, 16) – de Vries (1962) implies that sular is a Hebridean form of SG sùlaire, but Christiansen’s sular is a rendition in an unconventional orthography of SG sùlair.
), gen. idem, ‘northern gannet, Morus bassanus (formerly Sula bassanus)’ is derived from ON súla f. ‘idem’ + the Gaelic suffix -aire regularly (Cox 2022, 911–12 fn 747).
Cf. MacBain (1911, 353), Henderson (1910, 127), MacLennan (1925, 328), Christiansen (1938, 16), MacPherson (1945, 35), Lockwood (1961, 6, 33), Stewart (2004, 415), Ó Muirithe (2010) and McDonald (419–20, 2015, 130). Mackay (1897, 93: sular) cites Ice. haf-sula (leg. haf-súla) ‘idem’. Mackenzie (1905, 144) writes that in Scottish Gaelic in St Kilda the bird is called suileire (leg. sùileire) ‘the sharp-eyed’, a folk-etymologically driven form based on SG sùil [s̪u̟ːl], [s̪uːl] ‘eye’.
Exceptionally, the word appears as sùl in a St Kilda song: M’ eudail thusa, mo lur ’s mo shealgair | Thug thu ’n-dè dhomh ’n sùl ’s an gearrbhall (≈CG IV, 110) (‘You are my darling, my love and my hunter, | You gave me yesterday the gannet and the great auk’); whether sùl is a truncation of sùlaire in this context or an authentic form directly from ON súla is not clear: sùlaire itself occurs in another St Kilda song: Mar ri sùlaire a’ ghuib liath | Bheir an t-iasg à druim an t-srutha (CG V, 46) (‘Along with the gannet of the blue-grey bill | that takes the fish from the surface of the current’). For SG Sùlaisgeir HW620306, the name of a small island about 70 km (44 miles) north-north-east of Lewis, from ON *Súlusker ‘(the) skerry of the gannets’, see Cox ibid., 909–16.