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 Post subject: "Le mé"?
PostPosted: Wed 27 Aug 2014 3:57 pm 
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I was reading in bed last night and ran across this sentence:

" 'An bhfuil sí le mé a fhágáil anseo i m'amadán aonarach' a d'iarr sé ina intinn."

I don't think I've ever seen "le" and "mé" come together like that without becoming "liom." Is this a dialect feature, a feature of this particular construction, or a mistake?

The book in question is Pádraig Standún's "I gCóngar I gCéin" -- the Kindle version.

Redwolf


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 Post subject: Re: "Le mé"?
PostPosted: Wed 27 Aug 2014 4:06 pm 
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Redwolf wrote:
I was reading in bed last night and ran across this sentence:

" 'An bhfuil sí le mé a fhágáil anseo i m'amadán aonarach' a d'iarr sé ina intinn."

I don't think I've ever seen "le" and "mé" come together like that without becoming "liom." Is this a dialect feature, a feature of this particular construction, or a mistake?

The book in question is Pádraig Standún's "I gCóngar I gCéin" -- the Kindle version.

Redwolf


"Is she going to/about to leave me here as a solitary fool ...."
Not a mistake. It's common in Connemara. I don't know about anywhere else.


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 Post subject: Re: "Le mé"?
PostPosted: Wed 27 Aug 2014 4:13 pm 
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Prepositional pronouns tend to have modal senses. Sounds like it's handy for simple meanings to keep them seperate

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 Post subject: Re: "Le mé"?
PostPosted: Wed 27 Aug 2014 4:37 pm 
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In your sentence "mé a fhágáil" is what you are about to do. There isn't a direct connection between the le and the here. Le just means about to/going to and then you state what is about to be done, which just happens in this case to involve .

Think of this one:

chugham = toward me

chun mise a shábháil = in order to save me

In the second case chun and mise don't combine because "mise a shábháil" is considered a phrase itself.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
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 Post subject: Re: "Le mé"?
PostPosted: Wed 27 Aug 2014 5:03 pm 
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Yeah, you can sense the 'clefting' or phrasal difference in it

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 Post subject: Re: "Le mé"?
PostPosted: Wed 27 Aug 2014 6:05 pm 
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In some schools of grammar, words and phrases are described as "ruling" or being "ruled by" each other, and we're usually talking about a direct relationship.

In "I'm about to kill you," 'you' is ruled by the verb 'kill', and 'kill' is ruled by 'about to'. In English, the hierarchy more or less follows the word order.

In Irish, ruling normally follows word order, but the inversion here is an exception. "Mise a shábháil" still means "to save me", even if the word order is more like "me to save", so the "me" is still ruled by the verb save.

The prepositional pronouns only occur when the preposition directly rules the pronoun.

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 Post subject: Re: "Le mé"?
PostPosted: Wed 27 Aug 2014 7:20 pm 
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Location: Santa Cruz Mountains, California, USA
Thanks, all!


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