djwebb2021 wrote:
I'm finding things in Pinocchio all the time that are not in dictionaries. On p24 of the modern edition:
Quote:
Níl pioc-a-mhair agam a fhéadfainn a thabhairt duit.
This must mean "I don't have a single thing I could give you", but pioc-a-mhair is not found anywhere. Would you say it is pioc+maireann?
It looks like it could be interpreted as a verbal noun rendered from the verb
mair, other than the expected form
maireachtáil, which then came to be embedded in this phrase. Perhaps a dialectal variant? If that's the correct analysis, then I'd interpret the
a as Ó Dónaill's
a4, "Used to connect a preceding noun or pron. with vn." as in
Uisce a ól. So a literal translation of
pioc-a-mhair might be "scrap-to-survive [on]".
Because I don't know of any dialectal use of
mair in place of
maireachtáil, though, I'm inclined to think it may be a fossilised use of the verb with a relative
a, where
pioc-a-mhair means "a scrap which survives/remains", but the phrase itself can be use nominally "a remaining-scrap to give you".
In any event, I think your intuition about what it means is on the ball, and a reasonable idiomatic translation of what's going on, other than the one you gave above, might be "I don't even have a last-remaining-morsel that I could give you".