Breandán wrote:
Braoin has used the article with áilleacht, i..e., leis an áilleacht versus le háilleacht. Perhaps the long modifier requires it? Or can it be either? What do others think about it?
I don’t think it’s needed. In this instance, the definite article feels the same to me in Irish as it does in English, which changes the meaning of the phrase (though not radically so). I prefer it without the article here.
Quote:
Okay so what I think I'd do if I wanted to keep the "Our" in it is I would use "Tá ár" instead of "Tá an" right?! Does "Tá ár" mean Our & "Tá an" me The?
Tá means ‘is’ (or ‘are’). In Irish, the verb always comes first in the sentence.
Ár does indeed mean ‘our’, and
an means ‘the’.
Quote:
what is the difference between "dhár" & "do na"?
Dhár is a dialectal form of
dár, which is
do ‘to/for’ +
ár ‘our’. In
do na, the second word,
na, is the definite article in the plural (
an is the singular).
So
an croí ‘the heart’ (singular); but
na súile ‘the eyes’ (plural).
Quote:
I see that you said the "do na" is more Irish but does it mean the same thing?
It means the same, yes. In English, when discussing parts of the body, you nearly always use possessive adjectives to qualify them: you say “I’m washing
my hands”, “I cut
my finger”, etc. In Irish, it’s more common to use simply the definite form: “I’m washing the hands”, “I cut the finger”, etc. The meaning is the same as in English.
In this case, you can choose freely in Irish whether you want ‘our eyes’ or ‘the eyes’. I wouldn’t even say ‘the eyes’ is more natural Irish than ‘our eyes’ here, though in many structures it definitely is. In this example, though, I’d say they’re equal; neither feels un-Irish.
Quote:
Oh & I noticed that one of the words have a different letter placing, Breandán has "gcroí" & Chaitríona has "croí" whats the difference in that also?
That’s purely grammatical. It’s a process called eclipsis.
Many centuries ago, before Old Irish, the sequence of a nasal followed by an unvoiced stop or f (that is, n or m followed by a p, t, or c—the latter always pronounced as a k, never as an s) developed into the voiced counterpart of the stop.
So, nc became g; mp became b; and nt became d. This took place inside words (as is common in languages): so the word
idir ‘between’ is cognate to Latin
inter-, and
cúig(e) ‘five’ is cognate to Latin
quinque, which is easy to see once you know that d is the Irish outcome of nt, and g is the outcome of nc (or, as here, of nqu[e]). But unlike in most languages where such changes happen, in the Celtic languages, the changes also happened and stuck across word boundaries.
So if you had a word that originally ended in n or m, and then the next word begins in a p, t, or c, then that gets screwed up, too.
Now, the word
ár was at that point something like
*áron, and
croí begins with a c. So (ignoring the spaces between the words, and the fact that
croí is not how that word would have looked two thousand years ago),
*ároncroí became
*árogroí. This concept of the first consonant in a word being voiced like that because of a previous word is what is known as eclipsis.
At some point,
*áron lost its final syllable and became just
ár, but the effect it had on the following word still lingered on. So people continued to say the g instead of a c. They couldn’t quite figure out how to best represent that in writing for many hundred years, but nowadays it’s consistently written so that you
first write the consonant spoken (g), and
then the ‘real’ consonant, the one that the word begins with if it’s not next to a word that triggers eclipsis.
So when you write
ár gcroí, the c is silent—it’s just there to let you know that the word actually begins with a c; the c has just been eclipsed into a g.
The definite article
an, conversely, never ended in a nasal consonant, so no such change ever took place there:
an croí just remains
an croí.
I hope that explains it understandably.
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It just struck me that the process of "translation" on the forums is a bit like choosing clothing at a shop, you try this with that to see how they fit and if they go together, then you try something else to see if it will go better. Hopefully you'll end up with an outfit you can wear for life. In the end it may be more a case of personal taste than "correctness".
