NiallBeag wrote:
I don't come across a lot of long passives in Gaelic -- if you want to say who did it, you tend to just use an active voice.
Sure, that makes sense, and it’s probably also the more common way in Irish. I was more interested if such construction is possible and intelligible in Scottish.
NiallBeag wrote:
As well as the form you use above, there's another form that's typically only used in the past:
Chaidh an leabhar a leughadh -- word for word that's "went the book its reading", essentially meaning "the reading of the book occurred".
Chaidh mo phògadh -- "went my kissing" -- "kissing of me happened"
That’s an interesting way of expressing an action. Thanks.

NiallBeag wrote:
and an impersonal verb inflection that wouldn't work with the first but does with the second: (but again doesn't really work in the present
Pògadh mi -- "kissed(indeterminate person) me"
However, it does exist, and the most common preposition is le, which is also used for naming presenters on TV or authors of books, so equivalent to a certain sense of English's "by".
OK, that is also common with Irish,
pógadh mé for “one kissed me”/“I was kissed”. But Irish does have present autonomous form:
pógtar mé – “I am kissed”, “one kisses me” (repeatedly, habitually). As I understand that is not true in Scottish Gaelic – it has only past-autonomous?
NiallBeag wrote:
Urk, no! That's a book error and a worryingly persistent myth, arising from the teaching of other languages and a misinterpretation of English grammar. Tha mi a'... is about now. It can me that you're sitting reading it at this very minute, or that I'm currently in the process of reading a particular book, but if you want to say "I read a book every night", you'd use the habitual, which uses the future tense.
Oh, thank you for pointing that out. I knew that some verbs may use the future form to indicate habitual actions (like
chì mi for “I see”), but I thought it’s true only for a small set of them, and read somewhere that verbal-noun construction is used for both. Does it mean that
nì mi e can mean both “I do it (every week)” and “I’ll do it (tomorrow)”, depending on context?
I also just checked in taic, that it’s quite the opposite to what I thought – a small set of verbs can have a habitual, repeated meaning in vn-construction (
tha mi a’ smaointinn, ‘I think’), and “the Future Tense of a verb must be used to express an immediate future action as well as a repeated action in the present” – but, again, only repeating action examples are with the future form of
bi, eg.
Bidh iad a' cluich anns a' phàirc a h-uile là - They play in the park every day
Anyway, thank you very much for your answers, I think it clears an image in my head. From what I believe right now, such construction is possible in Scottish, but is uncommon, and (nearly?) always it is expressed by other means (like autonomous verbs) – that would explain why I had such hard time trying to Google any example of it.
