a broad generalisation about old irish:
so you've come across a medieval irish word and you're pretty sure it's doing something funky. it's definitely not a single-word translation into english. it might even be multiple words combined in a compound, which is going to make looking it up a tiny bit more complicated.
your first thought is that there's a verb involved
wrong
this is almost always wrong, tbh. even in sentences -- old irish hates verbs. it only has a few and the rest are just nouns in disguise. if they can get away with not having a verb? they won't have a verb. it is astonishingly unlikely that they will ever have a superfluous verb, bc why bother when a noun would do? there are verbal nouns fucking everywhere. why do you think you get sentences like "their killing by him after that" (i.e. "he killed them then")?? bc fuck verbs, no one needs them
but also if you do have a verb it is not going to be in a word with a noun. it might be combined with an infixed pronoun... but that's still not the same thing
your verbs will usually be separate. nice and isolated where they can think about their sins (their sins being 50 attested forms and twelve different meanings)
now, nouns, nouns can do the dirty and become compounds with each other, but this usually actually just means making a new word that can be broken down into its constituent parts if you really try
the point is, if you have an old irish word and someone tries to tell you that this single word forms a phrase or sentence including a verb... be really fucking suspicious, bc there's a 90% chance they're talking bullshit. it's far more likely to be a noun doing the work of a phrase or sentence and getting none of the hazard pay that verbs get for going up against the pronoun hordes
and/or it's literally just a noun
