ms spock said:

You know Old Irish esselte?

Go hiontoch!

No, sorry, I didn’t mean to give that impression.

When I say it’s close to being understandable, I’m talking more in a general sense that I can almost glean the subject and meaning of the poem, some words feel familiar but I don’t actually know what they translate to. But this poem is only “close to”, not actually at that point. It’s a feeling, more than anything else. A feeling that I’m a hairs breadth away from being able to at least determine the broad subject matter of the poem. I am familiar with a lot of old Scottish words, I immediately recognized the joke dv told a few days ago about the Scottish woman being “comfy” and confusing that with a question “where have you come from /come fae”, for example, and I’m guessing there would be some cross over there with Old Irish. So though I don’t speak Old Irish or Scots, I often can pick out enough words to get a general idea of what is being communicated depending, of course, on when it was originally written.