Math – good
Listen to the pronunciation guide
Pronounced mah – this is one of the indispensible Gaelic words and one of the first picked by both learners and children brought up with the language.
When asked Ciamar a tha sibh?, meaning "How are you?", one replies Tha gu math, meaning "Well". Many of us encounter math in the form of glè mhath – pronounced glay vah and meaning "very good".
The reason for the change from an m-sound to a v-sound is one of the delights of Gaelic grammar. A nice idiomatic use of math is the short phrase math fhèin, literally "good itself", and which means "that’s pretty good".
The common baby Gaelic for food is math-math, pronounced with the stress on the second math.
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