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PostPosted: Sat 18 Aug 2018 4:48 pm 
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galaxyrocker wrote:
An Cionnfhaolach wrote:

The chapter on Connacht Irish and Classical Irish in Stair na Gaeilge doesn't seem, as far as I can see (I only took a quick look), to shed any light on this issue. However, I agree, I think it is probably do, realised as dho, as well.



My first thought was to check those two chapters as well, actually. I found little about the syntax of the various verbal noun clauses in either of them; it mostly discussed the formation. In fact, it seems to be that way through the entire book, judging from the index. I also looked in Ó Curáin's The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, but wasn't able to find much there in the way of syntax of the verbal noun; the few examples listed under the verbal noun section of the book on verbs (2) detailed mostly uncommon, and in some cases obsolete, uses of the VN.


That's a slight issue with Stair na Gaeilge, it keeps the same structure and formatting throughout the book: which is a great idea in principle, but it means that certain issues like this one are overlooked.

It is certainly a rare case when you don't find the answer in Stair na Gaeilge.

Unfortunately, all of the dialectal grammars I've looked at are silent on the issue: i.e.

Stair na Gaeilge, Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne and Seana-chaint na nDéise.

Cian

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PostPosted: Wed 22 Aug 2018 7:38 pm 
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An Cionnfhaolach wrote:
The t-suffix is known as the intrusive t. Intrusive t becomes especially common after c.1750/ 1800, where it was often suffixed to nouns, verbal nouns and adverbs ending in -n, or -s. Hence, canmhain > canmhaint (Ir. canúint; cf. Sc. Gaelic Cànan), aríst, féachain > féachaint etc...

Intrusive t also occurs on verbal terminations ending in -aimís and -aidís in the Irish of east Cork, Waterford, Tipperary, Clare, and west and north Kerry: e.g. do théimíst, dá nglanaidíst etc...

The loss of f in frithissi is not a unique feature; the phenomenon is found throughout the development of the Irish language. The loss of f is attributed to what is known as hypercorrection. Since, lenited f has no sound, confusion arose as to whether f was in fact part of the original word, and thus the initial f often drops out. Hypercorrection also occurs in reverse, whereby f is often added to words which etymologically began with a vowel. In these instances, the f is known as an inorganic f: e.g. Old Ir. co n-accae > f(e)aca (nícon accae > ní fheaca); Old Ir. anaid > fan (nícon anaid > ní fhanann). The phenomenon continues to manifest itself in Modern Irish: iolar/ fiolar 'eagle' and aill 'cliff', Munster Irish: faill (cf. an fhaill, where an aill and an fhaill are indistinguishable).

The loss of personal endings in regards to frithissi/ aḟ- is not uncommon and also occurs with rarely used personal pronouns, e.g. féin. The use of the 3rd singular here as an adverb, meaning 'again', is part of the tendency for 3rd personal sing. of prepositional pronouns to gain adverbial force in general, even in Old Irish itself: íarum literally: 'after him/ it', adverb: 'afterwards'; ann: literally: 'in him/ it', adverb: 'there'. It occurs later in Middle Ir. with riam, literally: 'before him/ it', later used as an adverb for 'before'.

This is particularly fascinating. Thanks for telling!!!

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PostPosted: Thu 23 Aug 2018 7:10 pm 
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Regarding ag/do, I've asked a few people and there seems to be no agreement. Bourke's grammar (1856), p.136 claims the use of 'do' in progressive sentences is a recent mistake currently becoming popular in his day. However as noted above, both appear in verbal noun constructs back in the Middle Irish period.

Others I've talked to who know Classical Irish say it evolved from a confusion of ag/do rather than coming from either. Others say one or the other. So I really don't know anymore.

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PostPosted: Sat 12 Jan 2019 1:38 pm 
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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 +:
: agam, agam, aym, ‘at (by) me’
: 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 aym
be.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 eck
no.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 oc
be.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; eL
her: ah; ah; eh
our: árN; ar (ar n- before a vowel); nynN
your, y’all’s: bhurN (in Ulster: murN); ur (ur n- before a vowel); nynN
their: aN; an, am (before bilabials: p, b, m, f); nynN

It 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 agad
art-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).


Last edited by silmeth on Mon 14 Jan 2019 10:49 am, edited 3 times in total.

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PostPosted: Sun 13 Jan 2019 11:09 pm 
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Quote:
The t-suffix is known as the intrusive t. Intrusive t becomes especially common after c.1750/ 1800, where it was often suffixed to nouns, verbal nouns and adverbs ending in -n, or -s. Hence, canmhain > canmhaint (Ir. canúint; cf. Sc. Gaelic Cànan), aríst, féachain > féachaint etc...

Interesting, An Cionnfhaolach. Could that possibly explain how a surname like Mac Domhnaill (MacDhòmhnaill in Scotland) ended up with a "d" at the end of its anglicized version, McDonald?

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PostPosted: Mon 14 Jan 2019 1:28 am 
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One thing I've noticed about Irish is that, at least in South Connemara, the usage of cuid has spread to all plurals. So I've heard things such as mo chuid cosa. I'm not sure how recent this development is (Bríd, I heard it from youth in Carraroe, so maybe you can comment?) but it definitely seemed to be fairly prevalent among younger people there.


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PostPosted: Tue 15 Jan 2019 3:25 pm 
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galaxyrocker wrote:
One thing I've noticed about Irish is that, at least in South Connemara, the usage of cuid has spread to all plurals. So I've heard things such as mo chuid cosa. I'm not sure how recent this development is (Bríd, I heard it from youth in Carraroe, so maybe you can comment?) but it definitely seemed to be fairly prevalent among younger people there.


Yes.I know we use "cuid" a lot, I don't know the rules for it but certainly not as strict as other dialects, there may be exceptions but I can't think of any at the moment but I think I can use it with any plural. It's not just the young people, mostly the older generation I would've thought. When I first joined the forums I thought it odd how strictly "cuid" was used. :D
Give me examples of what "cuid" is not usually used for and I'll comment on that.


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PostPosted: Tue 15 Jan 2019 4:02 pm 
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Bríd Mhór wrote:
Yes.I know we use "cuid" a lot, I don't know the rules for it but certainly not as strict as other dialects, there may be exceptions but I can't think of any at the moment but I think I can use it with any plural. It's not just the young people, mostly the older generation I would've thought. When I first joined the forums I thought it odd how strictly "cuid" was used. :D
Give me examples of what "cuid" is not usually used for and I'll comment on that.


I think it isn’t usually used with body parts (as galaxyrocker wrote, eg. mo chosa and not *mo chuid cos¹ – this example is also given in Wiktionary and GnaG), or with family members, so mo thuismitheoirí rather than *mo chuid tuismitheoirí, mo dheartháireacha, rather than *mo chuid deartháireacha, m’uncailí, mo dheirfiúracha, m’aintíní, etc.

Does your dialect use cuid in those instances? If so, do you happen to say those without cuid, or do you always use cuid?

¹ galaxyrocker and Wiktionary give mo chuid cosa, but the gen.pl. is cos, so I’d expect, if one uses cuid for legs/feet, mo chuid cos ‘my share of legs’ instead.


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PostPosted: Wed 16 Jan 2019 10:20 pm 
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The genitive plural is all but dead, and the singular isn't too far behind it. I've even heard 'mo chuid airgead' multiple times from a teacher (he taught in a Gaelscoil and at NUIG for the C1, born and raised in Carraroe), ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. So cosa is definitely used there (also what I got told from another native on my post about cuid on Reddit). Likewise, tuismitheoirí is rarely used (muintir being more common).

Also, interesting Bríd! I would've assumed it was a younger thing, like the increasing use of 'dur'. What about the pronunciation of ó as uaidh?


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PostPosted: Thu 17 Jan 2019 11:02 am 
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I wonder what are the dialects where the genitive case is still used except in set phrases. In all the studies I read about dialects, the author says that the genitive is almost only used in set phrases now.
I guess it changed with the death of the last monoglots. When people started to be bilingual, they ceased to use the genitive case...

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