Re: is trua vs tá trua ann, I think that the copula vs. tá distinction may have had its rationale in permanent vs temporary states once, but over the centuries the thing has developed in the form of word collocations. So "is trua" is the preferred phrase, as a set collocation?

Edit: tá truagh ann is not found once in Father Peter's works.

I think you're right on this. And re "is ciúin an fear", I don't know what syntactical variation there is across Ireland. That may be said in some parts, but what I'm familiar with is "is ciúin an fear é", with a subject pronoun. (Is deas an tigh é is a sentence in Peadar Ua Loaghaire's works). Now, I can't remember exactly what O'Nolan said about this. Did he argue that "an fear é" was the subject and that this is an elided form of "an fear is é"?

Peadar Ua Laoghaire also has "Is maith é an t-airgead, an té go mbeadh a dhóithin aige dhe", with a subsubject é before an t-airgead. Another common one is "is maith í an fhoighne".

What is the difference between these:

is ciúin é an fear
is ciúin an fear é

Maybe Silmeth can help with this?

???

Word collocation might indeed explain the exceptions that keep cropping up.

I have heard 'Is trua...' multiple times. However I have never actually heard 'Tá trua ann...'. I was just speculating that it might be acceptable to say.

My guess is that 'is ciúin é an fear' is the exact same as 'is ciúin an fear'. (The addition of the subsubject 'é' is maybe a characteristic of Munster Irish?) But I think they both simply mean 'The man is quiet'.

Whereas, my interpretation is that 'is ciúin an fear é' means 'He is a quiet man'.

It might seem like 'The man is quiet' and the 'He is a quiet man' mean more-or-less the same thing. But there is a subtle difference, which I can't quite explain. Maybe in the first sentence the man being spoken of is being introduced into the conversation for the first time e.g. 'The man over there is quiet', whereas in the second sentence, the man being spoken of has already been introduced in a previous sentence e.g. 'I met John yesterday. He is a quiet man.'

However, I'm not sure how to parse a sentence like 'is ciúin é an fear'.

Edit: there is also the following possibility: 'Is fear ciúin é'. (He is a quiet man.) Now I'm getting totally confused between the possibilities.

Is fear ciúin é. = He is a quiet man. (unemphasized)
Is ciúin an fear é. = He is a quiet man. (the adjective "quiet" is emphasized), lit. perhaps "He is (a) quiet (one), the man"
Is ciúin (é) an fear. = The man is quiet.

There is also said to be a subtle, perhaps doubtful difference in meaning between Is ciúin an fear. and Is ciúin é an fear.
Is ciúin an fear. = The man (as such) is quiet.
Is ciúin é an fear. = The (this particulary) man is (unusually) quiet.

Nice succinct explanation. Thanks.

I didn't realise what a can of worms I was opening.
But thanks for all the insightful feedback!


I'm inclined to agree, but it does seem to me like this interpretation may have been something of a development from a simple 3rd sg. copula form which simply contained the subject, or at least inflected to compliment it. i.e. in is dorcha in adaig "it is dark, the night", the copula is "it is" might have been the copula inflecting to compliment the subject in adaig "the night", but seems to have become reinterpreted as simply "the night is dark" where is is just a general copula, even by the Old Irish period as the 3rd sg. copula came to be used across the paradigm except for 3rd plural, it insi Ériu agus Albu "Ireland and Britain are islands" where it = "they are" (e.g. from Stifter's Sengoídelc p. 119).


I'm inclined to read a difference in purpose between am rí "I am (a) king" and is meise in rí "I am the king!". The latter I think uses the copula to deliberately front the emphatic pronominal form to emphasise that it is not anybody else who is king, while the former seems more informative, "in case you weren't aware, I happen to be a king".


This theme of permanence is certainly one I instinctively associate with the copula, though, as Caoilte has pointed out at length, it doesn't seem to hold in all cases. In my own example, is dorcha an oiche vs tá an oiche dorcha, I can't see how one can read the formerly described state as being more permanent than the latter. I suppose you could vaguely say it's more forceful, by fronting dorcha using the copula you're insinuating that darkness is an innate characteristic of the night, while using tá suggests that the night is presently dark, but this may change later. It still seems a stretch, though, and I'd also highlight other counterexamples to the perceived permanence rule, like Tá an teach mór introduced here by Caoilte.


Well it certainly is the case that the substantive verb in Old Irish served more functions than it does in modern Irish, and the copula has taken over those functions. silmeth has already given us examples of these, but Stifter goes so far as to say "the substantive verb may apparently also always be employed instead of the copula, especially when the predicate does - for whatever reason - not immediately follow the verb ... e.g., biid duine slán 7 fírián 'man is sound and righteous' for normal *is slán 7 fíriánduine (Wb. 4d33)" (Sengoidelc, p. 119).


I've always considered the copula to be just a linking particle, at least in modern Irish, used to link subject and predicate in an X = Y sort of formulation. Verbs, by contrast, have objects instead of predicates. So it is the substantive verb that appears to be acting strangely to me by apparently taking a predicate. The way I square this circle in my own mind is to perceive the substantive verb as being like any other verb, where the object can be dropped and an adjective can be used in an adverbial manner. For example, "John kicks Kevin" is a standard English Sub., Verb, Obj. formulation, but "John kicks hard" has no overt object. It is just a Sub., Verb+Adverb formula. In the same way, I perceive the adjective dorcha as acting more like an adverb when used with the substantive verb, tá sé ciúin "it is being quiet" where "quiet" is used adverbially. This explanation, I think, comes close to explaining the perceived permanent vs. changeable distinction you discuss.



I actually don't know if I'd agree that interrogative pronouns and adverbs like these can be compared to the copula in this way. I wouldn't say that "the question has the copula" in your example, djwebb, or that "Cad, Conas, Cathain are all copular words", Caoilte. Sure, they require the copula in response, but does that make them copulas themselves?


I think this nicely demonstrates the subtle differences between various uses of the copula. But I'm still more interested in the example I gave at the start. Can there really be any meaningful distinction, however subtle, between is dorcha an oiche and tá an oiche dorcha?

Ade, without actually knowing for sure, I think is dorcha an oíche is more emphatic, as dorcha comes first. At least I'm throwing that concept out there for discussion. With the substantive verb, you can make it emphatic by adding in go: tá an oíche go dorcha.

Cad does contain an implied copula, but the copula is not visible in the present tense. Past-tense versions seem to be very rare, but Peadar Ua Laoghaire had cad ab iad na fiolair? in Críost Mac Dé Vol 1.

That would have been my suspicion as well, but I'm glad to get a second opinion to back that up. Even still, the distinction seems subtle, and much more force could be applied using the substantive verb if desired, tá an oiche ana dhorcha or tá an oiche go hana dhorcha



Agreed, a copula is implied by interrogatives, but I'd draw the line at equating interrogatives with the copula. But, that's probably too much exposure to dependency parsing talking.

In any case, the examples were interesting. My attempt at answering, at least the cén t-am é? riddle, is that the question refers to time, a constant, hence the copula is appropriate. The response, tá sé a hocht a chlog, refers to a an hour on the clock which will be different in an hours time, hence the substantive verb is appropriate. The current measure of time changes, but the movement of time appears relatively unchanging. Because the answer requires reference to the measure, though the question refers to time itself, it doesn't seem to defy the convention that the copula should be used for more permanent concepts, and the substantive verb for changeable ones.

I think you misunderstood me. Of course it’s 3rd sg. form of the copula. What form of a verb (OIr. copula is unstressed, so it’s a clitic, but it still has most of its old verbal paradigm, so it also still behaves somewhat as a verb at that point) do you use with a singular 3rd person noun subject? The 3rd sg. form. There was no other form of the copula that would be somehow “subjectless”. So obviously is dorcha in adaig uses the same form as is fer(-som) ‘he is a man’. This does not mean that in the former case the copula contains a subject pronoun in any meaningful way. It doesn’t! It’s not it is dark, the night, it is just the night is dark. The 3rd sg. form of the copula agrees in number and person with the subject but does not contain it.

Now, Old Irish doesn’t have subject pronouns, so of course whenever you want to say ‘it is dark’, you just say is dorcha – and here the subject is hidden in the same copular form. But that’s only because the subject is a pronoun (and explicit subject pronouns are not a thing of Old Irish).

EDIT: It’s the same with “normal” accented verbs: do·beir in fer claideb dam is ‘the man gives a sword to me’ and not ‘he gives me a sword, the man’. The verb just agrees with the subject, doesn’t “contain” it. But of course, if you remove in fer, then the sentence becomes “(s)he gives me a sword” – because now no subject is explicitly expressed.



They are different. I wasn’t saying they’re not. They are different in that the first is a classification sentence: I am a king – stating what sort of thing/person I am, what role I fulfil, while the second is identification: I am the king – stating who, which individual, I am. And it seems to me that in identification Old Irish preferred to put the pronoun in predicate’s slot, so more literally ‘the king is me’.



Well, as for the earliest stages of Irish:

As for the form of both – they both generally continue two Indo-European ‘be’ roots, *h₁es- and *bʰúH-, compare English is and be. Substantive verb forms like bí or beidh continue the stressed forms of the old ‘to be’ verb, while copular forms like ba or is continue unstressed forms (they go back to the same Proto-Celtic forms, just developed differently under lexical stress and before the lexical stress).

The at·tá → tá form of the substantive verb continues a different verb entirely, PIE root *steh₂- meaning ‘stand’ (and cognate with English ‘stand’), so tá an fear ansan goes back to something that meant ‘the man stands there’ – and IMO this explains why the substantive verb historically mostly took adverbs as its predicatives. Spanish estar has similar origin (also from *steh₂-).

The present dependent form -fuil (OIr. ·fil, ·fel) continues some form (probably imperative) of a verb meaning ‘see!’ – and it did not take a predicative in Old Irish but a direct object. That is, the predicative originally was in accusative. It’s sometimes compared (although unrelated) to French voilà! (and also compare too similar ag sin → sin é, ‘see there’ → ‘there is’ development.

So it seems to me that in classification and identification clauses – equating two nouns – the ‘to be’ verb was very weak, sometimes omitted, never stressed. In saying other stuff (like current location, for example), it had its own stress (maybe to emphasize the temporal aspect of the verb’s tense?) and also in the present tense other verbs were used: to stand, to see. So when the ‘to be’ verb developed two separate sets of forms, stressed and unstressed, the suppletive verbs took over in the present tense and joined the “substantive verb” paradigm, but that basically required adverb predicatives.



Hmm, I never thought about the first question much… but the second sentence with tá makes perfect sense to me, since a seacht a chlog is used adverbially here, for stating time.




I agree with the explanation of the meaning, but I don’t really agree with the “He is (a) quiet (one), the man” phrasing for the second one. IMO it’s pretty much a literal translation of the 3rd type, when the pronoun is used.

Literally, as I understand them, they basically state:

1. Is fear ciúin é. = “He is a quiet man”
2. Is ciúin an fear é. = “The man that he is, is quiet” or just “The man – he – is quiet” (and I guess this actually continues is ciúin an fear, é where é specifies who is meant by an fear). But yes, ultimately the meaning is like 1: “he is a quiet man”. “He” (some specific person) is the theme and the subject, and both “the man” and “quiet” are the rheme, information given about him.
3. Is ciúin an fear. = “The man is quiet”
4. Is ciúin é an fear = the reverse of 2: “He – the man – is quiet”, “He is quiet, the man”. Here “the man” is the theme, the known stuff, and “quiet” is the new information given, the rheme. I guess é ‘he’ is added just on the model of 2., to have the same structure, the same number of constituents?

So to illustrate what the pragmatic difference between 2 and 3/4 is, let’s take the beginning of Fiche blian ag fás: Níl aon bhaol ná gur breá í an óige ‘there is no fear but that (the) youth is wonderful’ (‘the certain thing is that the youth is wonderful’) – it’s a generic statement about youth (represented in Irish by the definite an óige). If Muiris Ó Súilleabháin had written … gur breá an óige í, it would be “… that it/she is a wonderful youth” (and since he’d be referring to the youth with a specific pronoun, he’d mean some specific instance of youth, not the idea in general).

So is ciúin an fear é is a statement about “him” – someone discussed before, it might not have been yet established he’s a man; is ciúin é an fear is a statement about someone that the speaker and the listener know as “the man”.