Manx greetings are built the way English ones once were, by naming the time of day and wishing it well. Moghrey mie is “good morning”, literally “morning good”, with the adjective following the noun as it does throughout the language.
Every phrase carries its pronunciation where we can source it, an English approximation, and an [H] tag if the form is attested in the historical record. This page has more gaps than the others: several of these words are short function words that no dictionary we hold records the pronunciation of. Those are marked not yet sourced rather than guessed. See The Manx Alphabet and Pronunciation for why guessing from the spelling does not work.
Greetings and courtesies
| English | Manx (to one person) | Manx (to more than one) | Pronunciation | English approximation | Tag |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Good morning | Moghrey mie | — | /ˌmoxərə ˈmai/ | “MOKH-uh-ruh MY” | [H] |
| Good afternoon or evening | Fastyr mie | — | /ˌfastər ˈmai/ | “FAST-ur MY” | [H] |
| Good night | Oie vie | — | /əi ˈvai/ | “EE VY” | [H] |
| Welcome | Failt ort | Failt erriu | not yet sourced | — | [H] |
| How are you? | Kys t’ou? | Kanys ta shiu? | /kʲis tu/ · plural not yet sourced | “kiss TOO” | [H] |
| Thank you | Gura mie ayd | Gura mie eu | not yet sourced | — | [H] as a phrase |
| Please | My saillt | My sailliu | not yet sourced | — | ⚠️ |
| Goodbye | Slane lhiat · Bannaght lhiat | Slane lhiu · Bannaght lhiu | /slɛːn ˈlʲat/ | “slairn LYAT” | [H] |
| Excuse me | Gow my leshtal | — | not yet sourced | — | [H] |
| I do not understand | Cha nel mee toiggal | — | not yet sourced | — | [H] |
| Help! | Cooin lhiam! | — | not yet sourced | — | [H] |
Manx distinguishes singular from plural in the second person, as French and Irish do and English no longer does. Failt ort welcomes one person; failt erriu welcomes a group.
The correction that taught us something
Until this month we tagged failt ort, “welcome”, as a modern revival rather than a historical form. The reasoning looked sound. Cregeen’s dictionary of 1835 records failt only as “hired, bound to service”, the past participle of failley, to hire. The welcoming sense was nowhere in it, so we marked the greeting as revived and said so.
Checking a second historical dictionary overturned it. Kelly, in 1866, writes:
Failt, part. hired. Failt ort signifies success to thee, welcome.
And on the English side of the same book: “Welcome, inter. failt ort!”, with an alternative, shee-dy-vea, credited to Cregeen. The greeting is historically attested after all. Failt is simply a homograph: the same spelling serves both “hired” and the welcome.
We have corrected the tag. The lesson is worth stating plainly, because it applies to everything else on this site: absence from one dictionary is not evidence that a word is modern. A single-source negative should never have carried a revival tag. We now require positive evidence that a form is a revival coinage before marking it as one.
Words behind the phrases
Most of these greetings are two or three words, and the pieces recur. Learning the pieces gets you further than memorising the phrases:
| Manx | Meaning | Pronunciation |
|---|---|---|
| moghrey | morning | /moxərə/ |
| fastyr | afternoon, evening | /fastər/ |
| oie | night | /əi/ north · /iː/ south |
| mie | good | /mai/ |
| slane | whole, hale | /slɛːn/ |
| bannaght | a blessing | /banaxt/ |
| kys | how | /kʲis/ |
| ta | is, are | /tɑː/ |
| toiggal | understanding | /tiɡʲal/ |
| lhiat | with thee | /lʲat/ |
| lhiam | with me | /lʲam/ |
| ort | on thee | /ˈort/ |
| erriu | on you (plural) | /erʲu/ |
Two words that stand slightly apart
- gura is not a dictionary word on its own. It is a subjunctive, roughly “may it be”, surviving only inside the fixed courtesy gura mie ayd, literally “may it be good at you”. The phrase is thoroughly traditional; the single word is not something you will find listed, and it returns no hits in Kelly.
- fastyr has widened. Cregeen glosses it as “evening”, but the modern greeting fastyr mie is used from midday onward. Same word, larger territory, so it is still historically attested.
⚠️ Pronunciation is the honest gap on this page. Fockleyreen, which we expected to fill it, turns out to be a translation dictionary carrying no phonetic transcription at all. Neither Cregeen nor Kelly records pronunciation. The realistic routes are Kneen’s English-Manx Pronouncing Dictionary of 1938, which we have not yet located, and the native-speaker recordings held in the Manx Corpus and the Culture Vannin archive, which we are working out what we may reuse.