Lughaidh wrote:
Bog means soft (as opposed to hard), mín is soft (as opposed to rough).
bog = mou i bhFraincis
mín = doux
To make it sound more like other Irish proverbs, you may say:
Is mín an piliúr coinsias glan.
I suppose that’s a different cultural view on pillows …
I would never consider the ‘soft’ used to describe a pillow as the opposite of ‘rough’ (what pillows are rough? [*]), but the opposite of ‘hard’, since some pillows are actually quite hard—and therefore, quite uncomfortable (for me, anyway).
[*] The answer being obviously traditional Irish straw pillows!
Regarding soft and hard pillows. Since I foolishly left the army I have been sleeping on a piliúr bog and not a piliúr crua. Now as Bríd suggested to me if there was a lumpy 'cnaipe' in the cloth, then the piliúr could be bog but not mín... begod you could lose your head trying to figure things like this out.... for the purposes of the translation a 'soft pillow' for me would be 'piliúr bog' and a hard pillow would be 'piliúr crua' and a smooth cloth on a hard pillow would make it a 'piliúr crua le héadach mín', or on a soft pillow would make it a 'piliúr bog le héadach mín' but you would not need to say this in this second instance because 'piliúr bog' would cover it nicely.