Irish Translation Forum

Emphyrio wrote:These kind of recent reforms are no more the finishing touches of language reconstructing that took more than a thousand years. Old Irish had infinitely more structure and subtlety than the modern variant - with or without the dative. But as with all the Germanic and Romance languages all Celtic languages have been moving away from a synthetic structure to a more or less analytic one. The standard simply reflects the way in which the language is going. The dialects would have ended up there sooner or later anyway.

Caffler wrote:
as for that le n-ól vs le h-ól/le hól,
le n-ól when le is used in the same sense as chun - "in order to"
le h-ól when the meaning is to be drunk
táim anseo le n-ól - i'm here to drink
tá bainne le hól - there is milk to be drunk

anyway that's just my take on it and someone will probably pick it full of holes

Let's examine some of the examples provided on page 115 of "Progress in Irish":

rud éigin le n-ithe (something "to eat")
rud éigin le n-ól (something "to drink")

The construction "le" + verbal noun describes a purpose for the "something" that has yet to occur. It may make things clearer if we translate the above examples as though the verbal noun is a "passive infinitive" instead of the infinitive used in the book, i.e. "something to be eaten" and "something to be drunk" instead of "to eat" and "to drink".