Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Josquin » Thu Jul 12, 2018 6:42 pm

Can't give you real corrections on the Irish (maybe galaxyrocker will), but one thing stuck out to me: "níor rinne" doesn't exist. It's "ní dhearna".
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Jul 12, 2018 10:51 pm

I don't expect other members to run through everything I write and suggest corrections. If I get them I do however try to extract the message behind them, and in the case of "ní dhearna" I can actually trace the things I did check and pinpoint the information I didn't take into account. I looked the verb "study" up and discovered that the Irish prefer to say something like "do study": "déan staidéar". OK, the dictionary also says that the past tense (3.p. sing) of this verb is "rinne sé/si" - and then the savvy and experience student of Irish should be suspicious since the irregular verbs have an independent AND a dependent form, which for instance is used in some relative constructions and with some verbal particles. I didn't check that.

There is however still one trap. As indicated by Josquin the negative form of the dependent past of "déan" is "ní dhearna", but in my Grammar Book the form is given as "déarna sé/si", and then you have to remember yourself that "ní", "nior" and several other particles cause lenition (And that you don't use "níor" in the past tense with precisely those irregular verbs, but just "ní").

I did study a few paragraphs of Harry Potter, but then I noticed that my dictionary threatened to split between p. 360 and 361, and then I hastened to apply some preventive glue to that place - which ended my studies of Irish for today. Yesterday I didn't study much Irish either, unless you count that I discovered the Irish Rhapsodies of the Irish composer Charles V. Stanford on Youtube. But after that I listened to a series of works by the Frenchman Maurice Ravel while reading the scores on IMSLP. When the powers that be of my hometown built a fancy and very expensive library, one sad consequence was that the collection of musical scores was relegated an annex somewhere, and that means that you have to order the scores you want to read and then return to fetch them a day or two later.OK, I know that very few loaners can read the stuff, but for me it has meant that I rarely listen to music with a score in my hand, and as with other things your skills erode away if you never use them. So I decided to train that skill, and I did it on works of the great instrumentator Ravel.

FR: Je viens de regarder un programme de télé dans la série "Secrets d'histoire" avec Stéphane Bern, et cette fois il a raconté l'histoire de Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France, qui était fille de Louis XVI et Marie Antoinette et soeur ainée dudit Louis XVII. Comme eux elle a été emprisonnée dans le Temple, mais contrairement à eux elle a survécu la révolution. Après le retour des Bourbons elle a passé du temps au cour, mais quand le roi Charles X (le frère ultra-conservateur des rois LOUIS XVI et XVIII) a été chassé de la France en 1848, elle et son mari - duc d'Angoulême et fils de Charles - l'ont suivi a Görz (l'actuelle ville de Gorizia/Gorica, qui aujourd'hui est divisée en deux parties par la frontière entre l'Italie et la Slovénie), où Charles est mort. Le couple n'ont pas eu des enfants, mais ils ont eu un neveu, qui plus tard a été connu comme Henri V, comte de Chambord - et le parti royaliste en France essayèrent en effet de convaincre Thiers à l'instaurer comme roi en 1870 (après la soi-disant "commune" et l'humiliante défaite devant les prussiens). Mais apparemment cet essai a échoué quand Henri a réfusé de reconnaître le tricolore - il préférait, on dit, le drapeau blanche d'avant la révolution. Et ce serait pour cette raison que la France n'ait pas eu une seconde restauration bourbonne. Personellement je doute que Thiers aurait cédé aux voeux des royalistes, mais c'est une belle historie, et il parait qu'il y ait même aujourd'hui un groupe minuscule de royalistes qui souhaiterait que la France redevienne un royaume sous un roi de la maison des Bourbons. Ou plutôt un groupe de 'légitimistes´, parce-qu'il y a aussi des royalistes qui préféreraient un descendant du roi Louis-Philippe ou même de l'empéreur Napoléon III sur le throne française dans le cas extrêmement peu réaliste qui la monarchie soient réinstaurée en France.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby galaxyrocker » Thu Jul 12, 2018 11:44 pm

Iversen wrote:IR: Inniu niór rinne mé staidéar ar an ngramadach gaeliche - rinne mé staidéar ar aon laethnach o Harry Potter, agus thóg mé feadh i bhfad. Tá mé a caibidil leis an litir do Harry a léamh.


Since I saw you didn't mind corrections:

As Joaquin already said, níor rinne would not be said in the standard, with ní dhearna used in its place. However it is often used in Connemara. It's not used in Donegal or Munster, but then again neither is 'dearna'.

Also,assuming you want the standaed: 'ar ghramadach na Gaeilge' sounds, to me, much nicer. Also aon leathanach amháin. If you use the aon before, you have to have amháin after. Also, not a huge deal, but make sure of the accent on the O. Also, I don't like "feadh i bhfad". "Ar feadh i bhfad" means 'for a long time', but I dunno if I've seen it used for something that's finished. My advice would be to use "tamall/achar fada".

As for the last sentence, if you wanted to say "I'm reading the chapter with the letter to Harry": Tá mé ag léamh na caibidile leis an litir do Harry
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Jul 13, 2018 12:30 am

OK, it is 'one .. only' then ("aon ... amhain").

It remember that I modelled the last sentence on an example I had seen somewhere - and which already seemed suspicious to me when I saw it, but in Irish my normal reactions don't count yet so I thought ... go for it, it is weird enough to be correct. Well, I then did commit a simple typo in "a caibidil", namely the missing 'n' (whereas the missing genitive ending 'e' is a real error).

However the situation about "a leamh" is more complicated. I have tried to locate the quote where "a leamh" (or something similar) was put at the very end of the sentence, but so far without success. I have however now looked "a leamh" up in Google and found examples like "Míníonn an t-alt seo conas bosca sonraí tacsanomaíochta a léamh" from ga.wikipedia.org (this article explains how box-with-taxonomydata 'to read'), and that looks exactly like the kind of sentence that lured me into putting "a leamh" at the end of my own sentence. And before I wrote that sentence I actually looked "leamh" up in my dictionary and followed a reference to "leigh", where I found "leabhar a léamh" (translated as 'to read a book'). But now that galaxyrocker has written that it actually should be "Tá mé ag léamh na caibidile leis an litir do Harry" I can only say that I' shall be happy to use "ag léamh" and to put it right after "Tá mé" in the future.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby galaxyrocker » Fri Jul 13, 2018 3:07 am

The difference there is whether you're using the verbal noun (VN) as an infinitive or as a gerund. If you're using it as if it were an English gerund, you use the "ag X" structure, with the following noun being in the genitive (thus na caibidile as opposed to an caibidile). It's literally something like "I am at X of Y" where Y is what's coming after the VN.

The infinitive structure is where you put it at the end and use a + lenition. It also happens when the object somehow comes before the VN, even when acting as a gerund, like in the question céard atá tú a dhéanamh -- What are you doing? where the céard is the object of ag déanamh and appears before it, thus requiring a dhéanamh. In the sentence that you gave with a léamh, it'd translate as "This article explains how to read a box of taxonomy details.

As to the VN, it's a tricky beast. It might be worth it to skim through Gramadach na Gaeilge's page on it, especially the first few entries, which is how you're most likely going to encounter it.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Jul 13, 2018 1:20 pm

Excellent explanation. Thank you for clearing things up for me. It seems to me that Irish as a whole is a tricky beast, and it is a language where the best policy for me is to do my translations as hyperliteral translations, where the Irish particularities are reflected in standardized, but definitely not authorized formulations in the translation language (Danish or English or a mixture). I remember that when I first looked at Irish around 2012 or so I had a tendency to see questions everywhere because of the sentences structure with initial verb. I solved the problem in my written work by adding a exclamation mark after to verb - so "tá mé ..." became "Er! jeg ... resp. "Is! I ...". Then I didn't touch Irish until last week, but now I have become accostumed to the weird word order, even though my last battle with Irish lay around 5 or 6 years back in time and I had forgotten everything else.

The construction with "Tá mé ag léamh na caibidile leis an litir do Harry" will then become something like "Is! I at-reading of-chapter with the letter to Harry". It is slightly harder to find a suitable hyperliteral understanding of the last element in "Míníonn an t-alt seo conas bosca sonraí tacsanomaíochta a léamh", but the sentence as a whole should be something like "Explains! this-article explains how box (of)details (of)taxonomy 'to read'. However this doesn't really explain the construction, so I consulted the Gramadach and found the following remarks under the preposition "a":

a = to

a is (almost) only used preceding verbal nouns,
It is actually a short form of the preposition do = to.
Sometimes, in older literature, and in Munster, do still is used instead of a:
e.g.: "chun na Gaedhilge d'fhoghluim" = chun na Gaeilge a fhoghlaim = to learn Irish.

Initial Mutations:
without article : lenition

Use:

in clauses like the "extended infinitive with to": e.g.: Bhí mé sásta míle a shiúl = I was happy to walk a mile.
not in the "simple infinitive with to" or only rarely used
instead of ag in the progressive in the relative clause: e.g.: an fear atá litir a scríobh = the man that is writing a letter. The object comes before the VN and is in the nominative/accusative (not the genitive)
Except preceding verbal nouns, a appears rarely: e.g. in a chlog = O'clock : a trí a chlog = 3 O'clock


I find it hilarious that "a" can be described as the short form of "do" in any language, but the notion of extended infinitive is quite interesting. When I want to understand it I can use "I have something to do" as its nearest parallel in English - and the weird thing about Irish is then just that a verbal noun is used instead of an infinitive.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby galaxyrocker » Fri Jul 13, 2018 2:44 pm

The funny thing, Iversen, is that your English example, when translated back into Irish, would not actually use that a. Instead, it'd use the preposition le -- tá rudaí le déanamh agam = I have things to do. See Gramadach na Gaeilge (where else?!) for the uses of le (and other prepositions, structures) with the verbal noun.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Jul 13, 2018 2:56 pm

My first reaction was "ARRRGHHHHH !!!" .

But then I considered the situation. I needed a syntactic parallel, and the English construction still serves that purpose (with the proviso that a verbal noun is used in Irish instead of an infinitive). The Irish may express the concrete content in another way, but that is more like a question of expressing yourself in an idiomatic way in a language. I already have seen some examples with "le" in my books, but there are thousands of expressions in Irish that differ from what I ever could have predicted even in my most delirious moments.

Btw. I just noticed that this thread has passed 900 entries and 60.000 views.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Jul 15, 2018 8:37 am

I read some parts of the Assimil Irlandais booklet lst evening, and purely by accident the first page I read happened to contain some examples with the preposition "le" ('with'): "is maith leis/lei ól" ('is good withhim/her (to) drink" = il/elle aime boire), "ni maith leat obair" ('not [is] good with-you work" = "tu n'aime aps travailler') and several more o' the same ilk. And then my thoughts veered off in two directions.

The first concerns the Irish tendency not to have certain verbs which are indispensable in other languages. For instance the next pages in Assimil illustrate how Irish doesn't use the construction "I have something" - no, it uses 'is! something with-me'. You don't know something --nay, knowledge is with thee. And you don't love somebody, no .. love is a place where you can be with somebody, although here English for once has something similar "be in love with somebody". I have read somewhere that some historic linguistics think that Proto-Indoeuropean may have been an ergative language. The constructions I quoted were definitely not ergative, but rather impersonal. This could however be a remnant from a situation where it wasn't obvious that every sentence consisted of NP + VP, as the chomskyites wanted us to believe. In purely ergative languages the 'object' (if there is one) takes precedence over the 'subject', and the morphological form ties subjects in sentences with intransitive verbs with the objects in sentences with transitive verbs, not with their subjects. Some verbs in English behave slightly similarly: you can split a piece of wood, but it can also split by itself if you let it dry out. So the preponderance in Irish of impersonal constructions with verbal nouns instead of constructions with a subject (NP) that does something with the help of a verb (VP) could in fact reflect a situation where an ergative protolanguage developed into a language with a preference for impersonal constructions rather than one dominated by sentences with an active subject and a verb.

The other thought that struck me is that "is" (or "ba" in the past tense) may not be a verb any longer (if it ever was). At page 46 in Assimil you find a table that says that Irish "is" means "est" in French, but then "n'est pas" is equated with "ni", "est?" with "an?" (it could have been "est-ce que?") and "n'est pas?" with "nach". In any other context these last three ones would be seen as verbal particles, so either "is" is a verbal" particle or it is a verb that only is used in positive constructions - and which doesn't have special forms for number and person, but only a past tense form - which to boot is replaced by particlelike things like "nár" outside the simple positive case. This raises some questions about the nature of "is". For any sane person this consideration might appear to be wildly off the mark, but the reason could be that there is a very common verb in English, namely "to be", which has the form "is" in the 3p singular ... and nobody in their sane mind would deny that this is a verb. So the translation into English may nudge us into thinking that the Irish construction with "is" is the same as in English. And where is the verb if it isn't "is" (triumphant look)! Well, if you can live without a verb in questions and negative sentences then methinks you could in positive ones too.

Well I don't say that "is" isn't a verb (and all my sources agree that it is), but it has been cut down to something that resembles a particle as much as a verb. And the particle category has also had its greedy eyes - or whatever it has got - fixed on the other copula verbum, "bí", which has analytic forms like "tá mé, tá tú.." etc. in the simple present, but negative forms like "níl mé, níl tú.." in negative sentences. And then I ask: between the particle n-something and the verb, who won the battle? The answer seems to be that the particle won, but the verb did leave its footprint in the form of the final -l (cfr the interrogative versions "an bhfuil mé?, an bhfuil tú?.." etc).

PS: I did one thing more that might be relevant in an Irish context: I listened to music of female composers on Youtube yesterday, and then I chanced upon an Irish lady named Ina Boyle. Her best known work is called "the Magic harp", but she has apparently written a lot of other works of different kinds in a pleasant neoromantic style - but outside Youtube you would never ever get a chance to hear them...

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Josquin » Sun Jul 15, 2018 11:07 am

Iversen wrote:And then I ask: between the particle n-something and the verb, who won the battle? The answer seems to be that the particle won, but the verb did leave its footprint in the form of the final -l (cfr the interrogative versions "an bhfuil mé?, an bhfuil tú?.." etc).

I think I wrote this already in your log, but maybe it's worth repeating it: "níl" used to be written "ní fhuil", so your deductions are absolutely correct!
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