Luke Ó Scolaidhe wrote:
Why 'Bí i do chailín maith anois'? Is this like Tá sí ina suí? She is sitting down, in otherwords she is immersed in HER action so 'i do chailín maith' is like 'be in your good girl mode'
Well, this actually goes back to Scottish vs Scotsman, and yes, you were quite right. (Sorry for that mistake!)
As a rule, the copula (
is) has to take two nouns/noun phrases and bind them together -- NíallBeag = Scotsman; always was, always will be.
The other "to be" (
beith) takes one noun/noun phrase (the subject) and describes its temporary or transitory state through either an adjective or other construction that determines state, eg in English
he is in the bath (no-one stays in the bath forever) or
he is there (but might go somewhere else later on.
Be warned, that this logic is only a starting point, because at some point you will hit an exception. These exceptions have their own logic, so they're nothing to be feared.
Consider:
The mouse is there.
The car is there.
The house is there.
The mountain is there.Now mice and cars move lots, so it's a temporary state.
Houses don't move, but they don't last forever, so you can argue that it's a temporary state.
Mountains.... well, most of them were there when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and they'll still be here when we're all extinct.
But (AFAIK) you still use "tá" when describing the location of the mountain. Why? Pure statistics. As most locations are temporary, people just got in the habit of saying it, and it was easier than categorising everything. (Incidentally, Spanish came to the same conclusion, and uses temporary is (estar) for all locations, regardless of whether it's movable or not.)
Quote:
Why gur instead of go bhfuil?
Basically, because "go bhfuil" is "that... is". "go bhfuil is" is therefore "that is is", which makes no sense.
The word for "that"/"which" is just "go", but the copula ([b]is[/i]) combines with "go" in an unusual way: go+is=gur.