Sir Seoras Uilleam Ros page 9 (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/39 ... es.html#II.):



This confused me, as -ann doesn't exist as a suffix in Sc. Gaelic. Maybe a borrowing.

Yes. It is a borrowing. The ending -ann existed as the dependent ending in Classical Gaelic poetry (eg. you’d say mairidh for ‘he lives’ but nach mair or nach maireann for ‘does not live’; cuiridh vs nach cuir / nach cuireann, etc.) – so Scottish poets were familiar with it, despite its not being a part of the native Scottish dialects. Classical Gaelic was also used in other formal contexts (law, chronicles…), so it must have entered Scottish Gaelic from there as a set phrase.

Today, via analogy with adjectives like boireann, fireann, the word is understood as an adjective meaning ‘alive’ (and you’ll see people writing things like tha i maireann too in Scotland).

Is Classical Gaelic as used by Scottish poets and writers the same or nearly the same as that used by Irish writers?
My experience is that prose writing did not follow the Dán Díreach standard, rather a related but less "strict" standard.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

Poems written by Scottish poets follow the same rules for dán díreach as the ones composed in Ireland (and you get poets like Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh who fled Ireland to Scotland and continued his work there for local lords). Even some recensions of grammatical tracts are from Scotland (eg. the manuscript A of IGT i, ie. National Library of Scotland Adv. 72.2.2, “may have been owned by the learned MacMhuirich family of South Uist and/or written by a member of that family” as Mac Cárthaigh puts it in The Art of Bardic Poetry).

But you’re completely right that prose texts don’t follow the grammatical rules of dán díreach that strictly. And that’s true not only for legal/religious texts or chronicles – even in dán díreach itself there might be prose fragments that do not follow the rules. Eg. the poem Foraois na gcliar clann Mhaoil Ruanaidh (edited by Mícheál Hoyne in Fuidheall Áir as the 2nd poem in the collection) has prose commentary between some quatrains that is an integral part of the poem, and those parts don’t follow the standard strictly (they might eg. use nominative where accusative would have been required). The same is true, especially in syntax, in the main body of grammatical tracts itself – the tracts often break the rules they themselves describe (they’re eg. often missing the lenition after relative copula; they sometimes use the new Irish “indirect relative clause” in the Munster flavour with agá used as the relative particle – which you won’t find in dán díreach, etc.) – so it’s clear the rules are to be followed in poetry but not necessarily otherwise.

But the prose texts also generally are pretty conservative, they still maintain the distinction between nominative and accusative to some extent (Keating will still generally have leis an bhfear mbeag vs don fhior bheag), they’ll use verbal forms obsolete in speech in the local dialect, etc. But also dialectal differences are seen (eg. Keating uses more synthetic forms than Conry – even though Conry still uses a lot of them and generally keeps close to classical grammar).

And I believe that’s true in texts from Scotland too. Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh (The Book of Common Order) from 1567, the first Gaelic book published ever, in Edinburgh, uses forms like tugaid; atáid for ‘they give, they are’, has consistent use of eclipsis, distinction between present and future – and in general it feels much closer to Classical Gaelic as used in Irish dán díreach than to late 18th–19th century Scottish Gaelic poems and prose.

I’m not sure what it was about the phrase nach maireann that it specifically entered Scotland, but Seosamh Watson in Stair na Gaeilge also notes it, p. 688, §19.3:

Thanks silmeth for that detailed response.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal