All right, one another translation of my old Polish posts (with a few newer additions). Thank y’all for your input, I hope you’ll keep at pointing my mistakes and clarify things I’m unsure about.
This time a portion of comparison between Irish and Scottish ways of expressing possession – the idea of having something. (Probably) none Celtic language has any direct verb with the meaning ‘to have’,
possibly except Breton, which seems to have one, beside an analytical construction.
Celtic languages express possession using constructions similar to Russian
у меня (есть), or to Finno-Ugric ones, but various Celtic groups use different prepositions – ‘I have something’ is literally ‘something is at me, by me, with me’.
In Goidelic languages one uses
ag (
ag,
aig (ag, a’),
ec) ‘at’ – the same preposition as in the progressive construction – generally pretty common preposition with a few meanings. Besides ‘at’ it may, for example, also mean ‘by’ to express the agent of a passive verb. And, as most Goidelic prepositions, it is inflected by persons, by connecting with nominative-accusative pronouns – a bit differently than with possessive ones:
ag +:
mé:
agam,
agam,
aym, ‘at (by) me’
tú:
agat,
agad,
ayd, ‘at thee’
é:
aige,
aige,
echey, ‘at him, it’
í:
aici,
aice,
eck, ‘at her, it’
sinn:
againn,
againn,
ain, ‘at us’
sibh:
agaibh,
agaibh,
eu, ‘at y’all’
iad:
acu,
aca,
oc, ‘at them’
And so ‘I have a dog’ is:
Tá madra agam,
Tha cù agam,
Ta moddey aymbe.pres dog.sg.nom-acc ag.1.sg‘Is a dog at me’
‘The man has a house’:
Tá teach ag an bhfear (Munster:
Tá tigh ag an bhfear, Ulster:
Tá teach ag an fhear);
Tha taigh aig an fhear /
aig an duine**;
Ta çhagh/thie* ec y dooinney / ec yn er**be.pres house.sg.nom-acc at art-det.sg.m.dat man.sg.dat‘Is a house at the man’
* çhagh (çhaagh) is equivalent to Irish teach, old nominative form, thie is equivalent to Scottish taigh, old dative form; Munster tigh also comes from old dative** dooinney is a cognate to Scottish duine ‘man, person’ and to Irish duine ’person’ and is more common on the Internet to mean ‘man’, er is just fer (cognate to Sc. and Ir. fear) after lenition, but looks to be rarer, archaic perhaps (?); duine and dooinney do not undergo lenition, as they start with a dental consonant, and no Goidelic dialect lenites dental consonants after the singular definite article.The possessive construction is also used to express abilities, especially ability to speak a language. ‘I speak (can speak) Irish/Scottish Gaelic/Manx’ is expressed by ‘I have (Irish/Scottish/Manx) Gaelic’. Ergo…
‘She didn’t speak Goidelic’:
Ní raibh Gaeilge aici (Munster:
Ní raibh Gaelainn aici, Ulster:
Cha raibh Gaeilg aici),
Cha robh Gàidhlig aice,
Cha row Gaelg eckno.part be.past.dep Gaelic.nom-acc at.3.sg.f‘Not was Gaelic (Irish, Scottish, Manx) at her’, ‘She didn’t have Gaelic’
‘They speak Polish’:
Tá Polainnis acu,
Tha Pòlainnis aca,
Ta Polynnish ocbe.pres Polish.nom-acc at.3.pl
‘Is Polish at them’, ‘they have Polish’
That’s quite easy and obvious. It gets funny when we approach (mentioned earlier)
possessive pronouns. Each Gaelic has them, and they’re similar (
L means it causes lenition¹,
N means it causes eclipsis²,
h means prefixing
h(-) before a vowel³):
my:
moL, (
m’ before a vowel);
moL (
m’ before a vowel);
myL (
m’ before a vowel)
thy:
doL, (
d’, dial.
t’ before a vowel);
doL (
t’ before a vowel);
dtyL (
dt’ before a vowel)
his:
aL;
aL;
eLher:
ah;
ah;
ehour:
árN;
ar (
ar n- before a vowel);
nynNyour, y’all’s:
bhurN (in Ulster:
murN);
ur (
ur n- before a vowel);
nynNtheir:
aN;
an,
am (before bilabials:
p, b, m, f);
nynNIt is quite hard to find anything about Manx pronouns. I managed to google
this book. Only finding it let me confirm that mutational effects are analogous to the Irish ones:
my,
dty and masculine
e cause lenition, feminine
e prefixes /h/, plural
nyn causes eclipsis.
In Connacht, all the plural pronouns (
árN,
bhurN,
aN) merged and are pronounced the same, as
a /ə/. The meaning is guessed from context, or
additional personal pronouns are added to disambiguate:
ár leabhar muide ‘our book’, lit. ‘our book
we’,
bhur gcarr sibhse ‘y’all’s car (y’all)’.
Manx, which also merged them to
nyn, disambiguates a bit differently, by adding inflected
ec:
nyn dhie oc ‘their house (at them)’,
nyn dhie eu ‘y’all’s house (at y’all)’,
Anyway various Goidelic languages make different use of those pronouns. Irish dialects are the easiest, they use possessive pronouns analogously to most other European languages, at least with countable, singular objects:
m’athair ‘my father’,
do chara ‘thy friend’,
a gcosa ‘their legs’,
a croí ‘her heart’,
a theach ‘his house’,
a mbord ‘their table’. Nothing special.
Scottish doesn’t work that way. There exists a distinction between
inalienable and
alienable possession there. Possessive pronouns are used only to mark inalienable possession – things owned permanently, inseparable, or very close – mostly body parts, family members etc.:
m’ athair ‘my father’,
do charaid ‘thy (very close) friend’,
an casan ‘their legs’,
a cridhe ‘her heart’. Also both in speech and in Scottish writing masculine
aL is most often elided before vowels (sometimes an apostrophe is put in its place in older writing), so
athair or
’ athair ‘his father’ vs
a h-athair ‘her father’,
fhiacail or
’ fhiacail ‘his tooth’ vs
a fiacail ‘her tooth’.
When a Scot intends to speak about something owned temporarily, or to which they aren’t so closely attached, they must use a construction analogous to the one described at the beginning of the post:
‘thy friend’:
an caraid agadart-def.sg.masc.acc-nom friend.sg.acc-nom at.2.sg‘the friend at thee’
Analogously:
an taigh aige ‘his house’ (‘the house at him’),
am bòrd aca ‘their table’ (‘the table at them’).
The same construction is also used alternatively to possessive pronouns in Manx, so instead of
nyn dhie oc one might also say
yn thie oc ‘the house at them’ for ‘their house’.
Quite a
what-the-fuck is that a wife is possessed inalienably (
mo bhean ‘my wife’), but apparently a husband isn’t (
an duine agam ‘my husband’)! By the way, here comes
duine again, which in Irish means a ‘person’ of unspecified gender, while in Scottish and Manx it’s rather a ‘man' or even ‘husband’.
I believe one could say
m’ fhear (?) for ‘my husband’ (and
not am fear agam which means
‘my one, the one of mine’ and might relate to any noun, including inanimate ones, of masculine grammatical gender), but I’m not sure, and it’s hard to find anything about it on the web.
More about possession in Scottish one can find on
the Akerbeltz wiki and on
GaelicGrammar.org.
Another interesting thing (mostly Irish) is that although possessive pronouns are used with plural objects, it is so only with inalienable possession of set amount of such objects:
mo chosa,
mo chasan, ‘my legs’. In Irish, when one intends to speak about a greater amount of countable things or about uncountable thing, one has to use auxiliary word
cuid (‘share’, ‘portion’) with genitive pl. (countable) or singular (uncountable), and so:
mo chuid airgid ‘my money’ (‘my share of money’),
a cuid grianghraf ‘her photographs’ (‘her share of photographs’).
The word
cuid also exists in Scottish Gaelic, but it doesn’t seem to fulfil such a grammatical role, as for alienable possession one just always uses the
na POSSESSED.pl aig POSSESSOR construction.
¹
Lenition is everywhere basically the same – it changes stops into fricatives while mostly keeping the place of articulation. The exceptions are: /s/, /t/ → /h/, /d/ → /ɣ/, /ɟ/ → /j/, /f/ disappears entirely. In writing it is marked in various ways: in older Irish script by a dot above the letter (c → ċ, b → ḃ etc.), in Irish and Scottish when using Roman type by adding
h after the consonant (c → ch, b → bh etc.), in Manx diversly, their orthography is crazy.
²
Eclipsis exists in morphology only in
Irish and
(at least in archaic) Manx, in Scottish it is basically a phonological phenomenon. In
Irish and
Manx it nasalizes voiced consonants, voices voiceless ones, and adds /n/ before a vowel (/p/ → /b/, /b/ → /m/, /t/ → /d/, /d/ → /n/, /a/ → /na/…), written in Irish by adding the voiced/nasal before modified consonant (p → bp, b → mb, t → dt, d → nd, a → n-a); in
Scottish it is somehow similar, but Scottish typically uses only voiceless non-nasals, differentiating fortis (aspirated) ones /p/ [pʰ] and lenis (unaspirated) ones /b/ [p] – eclipsis happens always after a nasal consonant, which causes a change from fortis to lenis, and lenis often becomes voiced (pa [pʰa] → am pa [am pa], ba [pa] → am ba [am ba]), although there might be a fuller eclipsis in the west (am ba [amːa]) – as this phenomenon is phonological, it
is not marked in writing (unless
n- is added before a vowel, or
n or
m after a vowel.
³ Usually this
h is a remnant of older consonant (often /s/) from a pronoun or an article, which was lenited, and later disappeared entirely before consonants and was kept only in intervocalic position. Scots, consistently with all other consonants before a vowel, write it with a hyphen (her father:
a h-athair), Irishmen write it without a hyphen (her father:
a hathair), as no native word may start with a h- (ergo, h at the beginning always is prefixed).