“a huge amount of scientific information in Irish was passed down orally, but was lost to the trauma of the famine and immigration.” Today, only 1.7 percent of the Irish population is fluent. Ó Séaghdha, who said many words in Irish are like “one-word poems,” finds himself fascinated by this bio-cultural knowledge. “The word for swallow is fáinleog,” he said. “It means little wanderer, because the bird migrates during winter. In our languages, we understood bird migration, thousands and thousands of years ago. We had words for phosphorus magnetism before they had scientific books.”