Hi Guys

"Tá leadóg á himirt ag na mná"

Why is the "h" in front of "imirt" ?

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Please feel free to correct anything I say in Irish that is incorrect.
Anything in English, leave it alone, I dont care.

Because "leadóg" is feminine:

Tennis is "at-her playing" by the women.

and "her playing" is "a himirt", so "at her playing" is "á himirt"

Similarly, "her father" is "a hathair" while "his father is "a athair". The feminine possessive "a" prefixes h to vowels.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

Go raibh maith agat.

Looking at the rules for determining whether something is masculine or feminine....
I don't see one that says "Sacar" is masculine, I think it is, but why?

_________________
Please feel free to correct anything I say in Irish that is incorrect.
Anything in English, leave it alone, I dont care.

There's no reason, there are just "etymological reasons", and so many exceptions that you have to learn the gender of every new noun. But it's the same thing in most languages of the world - you English speakers aren't used to that since there's no gender anymore in English, except for pronouns

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

cheers

_________________
Please feel free to correct anything I say in Irish that is incorrect.
Anything in English, leave it alone, I dont care.

I think nouns having grammatical gender is pretty well limited to Indo-European languages, if not European languages only. Most East Asian languages certainly don't have it.

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WARNING: Intermediate speaker - await further opinions, corrections and adjustments before acting on my advice.
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

The non-European Indo-European languages (Persian, Sanskrit, Armenian) have grammatical gender too, as do the Semitic languages. Other languages also divide their nouns into classes called "genders" although those genders aren't labeled masculine/feminine/(neuter). For example, a lot of Native American languages have an animate and an inanimate gender, and the complicated noun classes of the Bantu languages are considered genders as well.

Perhaps they have classes, but surely they should only be classed as "genders" if similar distinctions are also made for biological genders withib the language.

Do native Americans class their women as inanimate and their men as animate? (In a way, the Chinese do - women are Yin (passive) and men are Yang (active) - but it is not really a gender class.) The Japanese use different verbs for animate and inanimate subjects, but again it is not a "gender" distinction.

It all just sounds like Europeans trying to project the "universality" of their idiosyncrasies onto other languages based on a few cherry-picked examples (again).

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WARNING: Intermediate speaker - await further opinions, corrections and adjustments before acting on my advice.
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

Modern Persian has no gender. Sanskrit has, Hindi has...



yes, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic all have genders. Berber languages and Egyptian too.
There are no real noun genders in Lakhota but women and men don't speak the same way (there are different particles and stuff), as in Japanese, Korean (if I remember well)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender



well, no, grammatical genders do exist all over the world

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

But not in the strict sense of dividing all nouns into masculine and feminine (and neuter), which was what we were talking about in the first place.

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WARNING: Intermediate speaker - await further opinions, corrections and adjustments before acting on my advice.
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).