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Learning Irish can be a bit difficult at the start, until you break through
a certain barrier or threshold of understanding, and after that point
everything can become easy. The process can be good craic though, and
in a way the social element can be just as important as the linguistic
one.
I remember,
just after I did my A levels I was teaching a night class in Armagh.
I had probably just passed that learning threshold myself and I
was showing the students how to show ownership in Irish which is
different to the way we do it in English. A couple of days after
the class I got a phone call from a very worried and embarrassed
woman who said, “Antaine, I don’t know how to say this,
but I’m having trouble with my suspended genitive.”
It was a good thing that I was on the phone because if you had seen
the redness on my young face it was something else!
But the suspended
genitive is quite important. And just in case you were wondering,
it is fairly simple. The genitive case of a noun is used when you
want to show ownership of the noun for example dath
means colour and féar means grass, the colour
of the grass is dath an fhéir. The genitive
is also used after a verbal noun for example ag baint can
mean cutting, or harvesting, and an féar
as I said means the grass. Put the two together and you get ag
baint an fhéir.,
cutting the grass or the cutting of the grass. There is almost ownership
there anyway
Here are a few
other examples - the words an madadh means the
dog. And the word teach means house. The dog’s
house, or the house of the dog, as we say in Irish is teach
an mhadaidh. An madadh becomes an
mhadaidh in the genitive. If you wanted to reverse it and
say the dog of the house the words an teach (the house) would have
to go into the genitive case to become an tí
and you would get madadh an tí. This is
the same for Bean an tí, the woman of the
house, or the Mrs, or fear a tí, the man
of the house. Incidentally, to get back to the dog, the name Limavady
or Leim a mhadaidh has the word for dog in the
genitive case as well. Leim a’ Mhadaigh,
the dog’s leap, the leap of the dog.
That’s
the basics, but now to develop this further to the suspended genitive.
It is possible to have a number of nouns in a row all belonging
to each other and each meriting the genitive case because of ownership.
Where you have
a number of them you always suspend the genitive to the last noun
in the phrase and where possible aspirate, or put a h
after the first letter of each noun that isn’t in the genitive
case– I know that is a simplification but it is a useful one.
For example
the colour of the dog’s house. Is dath theach an mhadaigh.
The colour of the house would be dath an tí,
the dogs house would be teach an mhadaidh as we
saw before but when you put them together you get dath theach
an mhadaidh. Notice also that although in English the word
the, the definite article, is used twice, in Irish, like the genitive
it is used only once and at the end Dath theach an mhadaidh.
So that in very
simple terms is a look at the common problems around the suspended
genitive. Next week, if you like, I could give you a run down on
the major difficulties some learners have with an even more serious
complaint, the copula – now that is something
you need to be very careful with!
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