Irish Translation Forum

djwebb1969 · "Gaeilgeoir" Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: China Posts: 128

deleted

djwebb1969 · "Gaeilgeoir" Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: China Posts: 128

I have been having a good time looking in Bedell's Bible. I am sure Grmpy Old Fogy is right, but people maybe interested in usage in the Bible anyway:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Romans 8:35.
Cía dhealóchus inn ó ghrádh Chríosd?

Who hath warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come? Matthew 3:7
Cía do fhoillsigh dháoibh teitheamh ón fheirg atá ag teacht?

Throughout the New Testament (searched by looking for "Who" in a n electronic index of the KJV and then looking up the equivalent in the Irish Bible): I realised this "do" only supervenes when the following word is past tense and begins with a vowel or f. (hence the example above).

But: I would like an example of "cé do" with a non-past tense. The example above indicates that the "do" may be a perfective particle belonging to the past tense word that follows. I can find no examples of "do" with a non-past tense. I am thinking that **maybe** originally the perfective particle had to go in, come what may, and so you could have "cé do bhí" as you adduced, but after a while the "do" only "stuck" to a word beginning with f or a vowel, ie "cé d'fhoillsigh" above.

This is not an argument. This is a question of genuine interest: do you have a database of older Irish (eg the Corpas na Gaelainne) where you can look for such things? Can you do a word search? I would be interested in "cia do" followed by a verb tense that does not require the perfective particle. Eg "cía atá...." can be found many times in the Bible. But, could you get "cía do atá"?? I t sounds wrong.

Also I am not sure about someof these modern edtions. The poet you mentioned died 1818. HIs work edited in the 1970s could be more or less faithful to the original which may only survive in manuscript, or even in varying manuscripts. What does the editor say in the foreword to the book? I ask only out of interest. Please don't take it as an argument any longer. We can just research the thing together and have some fun.

If you can think of a good Bible passage with a Who? question in, let me know and I'llpost the Bedell version.

The Goy from Japan · "Giostaire" Joined: 10 Nov 2005 Posts: 4,014

The old TYI, Ó Siadhail and others mention that sometimes "a" is used in the case of past tense as a replacement for "do".

Cía do fhoillsigh > Cé a fhoillsigh . . .

But there might be a lot of qualification to this . . . Embarassed

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djwebb1969 · "Gaeilgeoir" Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: China Posts: 128

djwebb1969 · "Gaeilgeoir" Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: China Posts: 128

One source of traditional Irishi is http://www.biblebc.com/Irish/IrishBible/Luke_in_Irish.htm. The whole of the Gospel of Luke from Domhnaill's NT transcribed (in Roman letters ) i one file.

Aibigéal

The RIA's "Corpas na Gaeilge" is a wonderful resource but the search interface is not too flexible. I could search for "cia" and scroll through the 3000+ occurrences, but there is no way to search for "cia a" or "cia do."

If your university or library system has a subscription to Early English Books Online, there are some 17th-century goodies in there: Bedell's Bible, Ó Dónaill's Book of Common Prayer, Mícheál Ó Cleirigh's dictionary, and I don't remember what else. Good resolution, and you can page through them online or download them as PDFs (Bedell's Bible is 107MB but worth it!)
For 18th- and 19th-century books, try the Open-Access Text Archive. (Searchable Dinneen, anyone? Very Happy

)

Grumpy Old Fogey · "Getting Addicted" Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 60

From the number of deleted messages above it would appear that djwebb1969 has been refining his views while I slept.

I would respectfully suggest that something more than a rethink on the issue of relative particles is required. Any novice learner of Irish who accuses some of the most distinguished authorities, native speakers who spent their lives 'ag saothrú i ngort na Gaeilge', of inventing 'fatuous' grammatical rules and of being 'confused' has a somewhat shaky grasp of reality.

I have been speaking Irish daily since I started school at four years of age but I am not and never will be a native speaker. Whenever I encounter an unfamiliar grammatical form, idiom or usage from the mouth or pen of a native speaker, my first assumption is always that I lack some necessary information - not that the author or speaker is 'confused'. Of course, it sometimes happens that the native speaker really is confused, or that there is a misprint in the text, but one should not jump to that conclusion. The alternative explanation is always the more likely one.

One final point of a general nature before I turn to specifics: the idea that there is/was such a thing as 'traditional Irish' should be consigned to the scrap heap. A previous poster (whose contributions on the 'Daltaí na Gaeilge' forum invariably combine sound learning with good common sense) has already pointed out that this is not the case. The Irish language, like all languages, has been evolving throughout the course of history. Its grammar has varied from period to period and from place to place. The idea that there is some Procrustean form of Irish which represents the gold standard of correctness is a personal preference at best, naive nonsense at worst. If I were to start denouncing every innovation in the English language since the time of Shakespeare (or the King James Version, or Jane Austen, or Evelyn Waugh), or the English of America (or Ireland, or Australia, or India), as corruptions of 'traditional English' I would rightly be dismissed as a crank. The same principle applies to Irish.

Coming to the issue of the relative particle: it was not used in classical Irish. Rarely, it may be found in a classical text, bubbling up from vernacular speech, but it was not admitted to the literary standard. With the collapse of the classical standard in the post-Kinsale period, the relative particle began to be used with greater or lesser frequency depending on the conservatism or otherwise of the author in question. It was often restricted to the historic tenses while the relative forms of the verbs were retained in the primary tenses:
'an fear do scríobh'
'an fear do scríobhadh'
'an fear do scríobhfadh'
'an fear scríobhas'
'an fear scríobhfas'
It is easy to understand why this should be so, because what djwebb1969 calls the 'perfective particle' and the relative particle are one and the same word. Over time, relative 'do' found its way into all tenses and even came to be used in conjunction with the relative forms of the verb:
'Cia do chuirfeas cluithmhidhe na rás ar siubhal?' (= 'Cé a chuirfeas cluichí na rás ar siúl?')
Charlotte Brook, 'Reliques of Irish Poetry', 1789, p. 308.

The evolution from 'do' to 'a' owed something to the influence of 'atá', which came to be interpreted as a relative form of 'tá'. One will no more find 'do atá' in the literature than 'a atá' in modern speech.

djwebb1969 · "Gaeilgeoir" Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: China Posts: 128

Grumpy,

I did delete some posts. In particular, I posted a long list of artificial things in the CO, and then **I decided not to get into it**, as such discussions are not really on-topic on IGT. I think you joined **specifically** to start such a discussion. But I think I would, wrongly, get the blame for such a discussion, so I decided to delete my messages. See Daltaí discussions if you are interested in that topic.

But what am I meant to do when you carry the discussion on? For a start, you say when you see things you do not understand in native speakers' Irish, you do not immediately jump to the conclusion it is a mistake on their part. But **since when did you bump into a native speaker of CO Irish**? I just despair of such "logic". I was referring to the CO, which is **not** native Irish. Did I say that genuine Irish contains errors?

Who said there was one Procrustean form of traditional Irish? Who said that every innovation should be rejected? This is Don Quixote-like jousting. I am not aiming to bring back the accusative case or anything like that - I am just learning the *most* conservative dialect, but, Munster Irish is not the same as Keating's Irish, you may have noticed, **and I am not actually insisting that everyone does the same**. Peadar Ua Laoghaire stood against the attempt to revive dead Irish in his support for cainnt na ndaoine: the revival had to be based on real, existing Irish. But he supported what **he viewed** as the best Irish in existence (he says in his autobiography he specifically wrote Séadna to show learners of Irish what the best Irish was). But this thread was about the relative after cé, and not specifically about "which dialect to learn" - you have hijacked the thread to an extent.

I am delighted for you to share your knowledge of the evolution of Irish, as you do in your last paragraph. You speak of the relative particle emerging by spreading from the perfective particle, and explain the relative form of the verb was once used on its own, but I don't see "an fear bheas" as a correct form. The lenition on the relative form must be explained for a start. I am not saying you are wrong - I don't know, but asking for more information. The old (c.1900) edition of the Christian Brothers' Grammar says the relative particle emerged in a different way to the way you outlined: by contamination from not just 'do' but from a number of unaccented particles (perfective, the "a" of "atá, and the prefix to some verbs do-). P91 of the old green book says:

"The modern relative, in these cases, has arisen from a mistaken idea about certain particles. Before the imperfect, the past, and conditional the particle 'do' should, strictly speaking, be used. Certain irregular but often used verbs had also an unaccented first syllable, as 'atá', 'do-bheirim', 'do-chím', etc. These particles and syllables being unaccented were generally dropped in the beginning, but retained in the body, of a sentence, where the relative naturally occurs. Hence they were erroneously regarded as relative pronouns, from analogy with other languages."

The history of Irish would be fascinating if it were written. Some contribution to it is in Stair na Gaelainne, but it is a bit disappointing to me. I couldn't use that book to find out about the evolution of the relative particle, for instance. Maybe no-one will ever write the book that should be written on the evolution of Irish since the 17th century - but I regard that as a great shame.

Grumpy Old Fogey · "Getting Addicted" Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 60

djwebb1969,

I am not a 'joiner' by nature and I did not post on this forum in order to initiate a discussion on the relative merits or demerits of various dialects, historical forms, or the modern standard. You are free to study whatever form of Irish takes your fancy, from the inscriptions on ogham stones to 'Gaelscoilis', and I won't criticise you in the least. If 'an tAthair Peadar' happens to be your cup of tea, that's fine with me. I posted only in order to correct a number of glaring factual errors that might, because of the air of authority you affect, have misled the unwary. To be specific:

Supreemio

The Daltai gang is taking over!

Fáilte a Ghrumpy!
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Gaeilge go deo!

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