Today I encountered someone saying that "Tá sé deas" is a grammatically correct way of saying "He is nice" but this contradicts what I have read in every book on Irish I've studied. They have all given "Tá sé go deas" along with "Tá sé go híontach" etc.

Is this perhaps a dialectal question, perhaps in Ulster they tend not to use the go in this way?


Edit
I have changed my post from "Today I encountered someone saying that "Tá sé deas" is the grammatically" to "Today I encountered someone saying that "Tá sé deas" is a grammatically" as the use of the definite article implied something I had not actually intended. Sorry, RedWolf!

I don't think I've ever encountered "tá sé deas." It's one of those, like "maith" and "álainn," that's typically used as an adverb in these constructions. It's possible that the "go" sometimes gets dropped in speech (or said so quickly that it essentially bleeds into the other words), but if so, I haven't heard it.

Who was the person who told you that "tá sé deas" is "the" grammatically correct way of saying this? Even if it can be used this way, it's hardly the only correct approach.

Redwolf

He was responding to a question on iTalki. He didn't say that it was the only correct form but that the go was unnecessary. I felt he was implying that Tá sé deas was the more common construction. http://www.italki.com/question/278801

I had just never seen the usage and thought it was odd that someone who seemed to know what he was talking about in other questions was using a construction I had never encountered in the wild.

I'm not sure what lyrics the original poster was asking about, but grammar often goes by the wayside in songs and poetry, with syllables dropping right, left, and center.

That said, the specific lyric he/she was asking about was "nach bhfuil sí deas," and it seems to me that I HAVE heard "deas" without the "go" in that context, though I can't say whether it's common or not. It doesn't sound correct to my ear, but I'd stop short of saying it's incorrect without more input. It's possible I (and the person who responded) am thinking of the copula construction "nach deas í" though. It's also possible that the song writer was confused (it looks to be a new song rather than a traditional one).

Redwolf

Edited to add: This might be a good question for the Gaeilge Amháin gang on Facebook.

I wouldn't trust anyone who describes anything of this sort as "grammatically correct", because this isn't a question of what we typically think of as "grammar" -- ie "syntax".

One of linguistics's favourite nonsense sentences is "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". Noam Chomsky argues that this is "grammatically correct", and hence argues that grammar plays little role in meaning (weird argument, but never mind). Anyway, it follows the rules of syntax -- every word is in a slot that takes its class. The problem is that the words don't combine that way.

Consider this "school book" English sentence: A cat is on the table. It is "syntactically correct", but we wouldn't say that -- we would say "there's a cat on the table". You immediately recognise the intended meaning, but that doesn't make it correct English -- and yet books for learners (and books for English speakers learning to read!) are full of this type of unnatural phrase because it's deemed "grammatically correct" and "simple" enough for the target audience.

So when somebody says something is "grammatically correct", I tell the court transcriber in my head to strike it from the record, because "grammatically correct" is almost always just a way of justifying something that no-one anywhere would ever say.

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After further conversation it's exactly what I suspected. He speaks an Ulster dialect which does not normally use go with bí for adjectives of subjective judgement. My concern about this wasn't so much about the song but that someone who clearly knows what he's talking about (based on my observations from his participation on iTalki) was saying a construction I was completely unfamiliar with was acceptable or even preferable to the construction I was familiar with from every source I had ever read or studied. So my concern was that I did not know enough about the language and that perhaps my understanding was flawed. I could have very well seen this being that "go deas" was not really used when describing people anymore and had taken on a specialized meaning. The same way that in Brazilian Portuguese if you say a person is "interesting" you mean you find them attractive and want to go out with them (not I'm interested in Julia but Julia is interesting) but if you say a thing or idea is interesting it means exactly that. Well, at least that was the usage among people more or less my age back in the 90s.

Possibly one of my favourite sentences to read on the forum!

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