Modern Irish

A Comprehensive Grammar

Nancy Stenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315302010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Modern Irish: A Comprehensive Grammar is a complete reference guide to modern Irish grammar, providing a thorough overview of the language.

Key features include:

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• highly systematic coverage of all levels of structure: sound system, word formation, sentence construction and connection of sentences

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• authentic examples and English translations which provide an accessible insight into the mechanics of the language

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• an extensive index, numbered sections, cross-references and summary charts which provide readers with easy access to the information.

Modern Irish: A Comprehensive Grammar is an essential reference source for the learner and user of Irish. It is ideal for use in schools, colleges, universities, and adult classes of all types.

Chapter 1

Dialects of Irish

For a language spoken in such a small territory and by so few speakers, Irish displays an impressive variation in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. These differences constitute the dialect variation that will be mentioned throughout this grammar. In countries like England or France, similar variation is found (as in virtually all languages), but as English and French are spoken throughout their respective countries, one usage or pronunciation fades into the next and the boundaries of individual differences of speech are not the same for every vocabulary item or grammatical usage, so that the differences may not be immediately noticeable except at the geographic extremes. In Ireland, however, communities of native speakers have been isolated from each other for several centuries by intervening English-speaking populations. Before the advent of mass communication and widespread car ownership, these communities had little contact with one another and the language in each developed in its own way with minimal input from the others or from any kind of standardization. Thus the differences in the modern varieties, or dialects, can be quite noticeable, although with effort and good will they are mutually intelligible.

Three major dialect regions are generally distinguished, which are sometimes named for the provinces in which they are found: Ulster, Connacht, and Munster. The Gaeltacht regions are highlighted on the map below.

Figure  1.1  Gaeltacht regions of Ireland

County names, or even specific regions and villages, may also be used to pinpoint dialect areas more precisely. Donegal, the northernmost county of the republic in the historical province of Ulster, contains several Gaeltacht communities with a number of features of grammar and pronunciation that distinguish them from regions to the south, although they also differ from each other in more minor ways. This is the largest area geographically, but the numbers of speakers in the communities are relatively small. In Connacht, the west-central province, County Galway has the largest Irish-speaking population; Galway Irish includes the western region of Connemara and the coastal stretch just west of Galway, known as Cois Fharraige, as well as the Aran Islands. In addition, County Mayo in northern Connacht contains Gaeltacht communities that manifest some similarities to the dialect of Connemara but other features closer to southern Donegal speech. The dialects of Munster, all spoken south of the Shannon estuary, are found in the counties of Kerry, Cork, and Waterford. The speech of these regions differs noticeably from county to county but all share features in common that differentiate them from the dialects north of the Shannon. It is common also to hear reference to Northern (Ulster or Donegal) Irish, Western (Connacht or Connemara/Galway and Mayo) Irish, and Southern (Munster) Irish, designations that gloss over a number of differing features that distinguish individual communities within each of these regions.

In addition to these historic Gaeltacht areas, two other communities of Irish speakers deserve mention. A growing and vibrant Irish-speaking community in Belfast (cf. Maguire 1991, Mac Póilín 1997, O’Reilly 1999) draws largely on the Irish of Donegal, where many have attended Gaeltacht language courses, but it is developing in some respects in its own direction. Pronunciation and to some extent grammar are influenced heavily by the local English, since the majority of Belfast Irish speakers are second-language (L2) speakers of Irish, or in recent generations were raised bilingually by parents who grew up English-speaking but made the choice in adulthood to use Irish as their home language. In addition, two small Gaeltacht communities in the Leinster county of Meath were created starting in the 1930s, after the indigenous Irish had died out there. These communities were established by moving families from Gaeltachtaí in the west of Ireland to the more fertile farmland of Meath over a period of several years beginning in 1935. In Ráth Chairn, all the original settlers were from Cois Fharraige and farther west in Connemara, and the Irish still spoken there today is essentially that of Co. Galway. In Baile Ghib, settlers came from various other Gaeltachtaí, and the use of Irish in the community today, perhaps because of the dialect differences, is considerably more limited and dialectally mixed.

Finally, mention must be made of the Official Standard, or Caighdeán Oifigiúil (CO). After the first decades of official promotion and teaching of Irish, now nearly 100 years ago, and with its increasing use in parts of the Civil Service and in schools, a need emerged to establish some uniformity of grammar and vocabulary for purposes of consistency in teaching and publication. To this end, the CO was developed and published in the 1950s. The designers of the CO attempted to draw on all three major provincial dialects in creating their published grammar, although many speakers (from all regions) report the impression that the CO favors dialects other than their own. No attempt was made to promote a particular pronunciation over others, the assumption being that teachers would use, for example, the Caighdeán verb forms in teaching, but with their own regional accent and vocabulary. Thus, in general, the Caighdeán provides a predominately morphological and orthographic standard more than a phonological, syntactic or lexical one, with concentration on noun and verb paradigms and the environments triggering initial mutations. However, inevitably perhaps, the forms (including certain vocabulary choices) published in the CO tend to be taken by learners and many teachers as somehow ‘more correct’ than dialect forms not included in the publication, which has led to tensions regarding standards of usage between native speakers and L2 speakers of the language. Recent revisions to the CO have leaned toward allowing more dialect variation than previously, but it remains to be seen to what extent these more recent versions will be accepted in the teaching community, for example. This grammar attempts to avoid such judgments, proceeding from the standard linguistic presumption that the linguistic forms used consistently by native speakers of a given region are no more or less correct than those of other regions. The CO is taken to be a sometimes necessary and useful compromise among the dialects when consistency is desirable, as in education, publication and broadcasting, but is not meant to replace the regional spoken varieties.

Differences among the Gaeltacht regions may be phonological, morphological, syntactic or lexical. Phonological and morphological variation is the strongest. In this grammar, morphology sections (and some others) will start with CO forms for convenience, but where possible (and not too complex) will also acknowledge variation with brief commentary on regional conventions. Only brief summaries can be given here, but further details can be found in the many excellent studies of specific Irish dialects conducted throughout the twentieth century, among them de Bhaldraithe (1953, 1966), de Búrca (1970), Lucas (1979), Mhac an Fhalaigh (1968), Ó Cuív (1975), Ó Curnáin (2007), Ó Sé (2000), Stockman (1974), and Wagner (1979), among others. Ó Siadhail (1989) and Ó Raghallaigh (2013) also discuss dialect variation. Wagner (1958–69) is an excellent, if somewhat cumbersome, source of raw data for all dialects that still had living speakers in the mid-twentieth century. Transcripts of recorded conversations in Connemara Irish are published in Wigger (2004).

Chapter 2

Sounds and spellings

In terms of Irish pronunciation, the consonants are more challenging to a learner than the vowels, although it may not seem so at first. Vowel pronunciations are fairly straightforward, except that they can vary considerably from region to region, so that the same words may sound quite different when pronounced by speakers from different counties. A number of print and online sources offer pronunciation guidelines for many different dialects, and the present work will not seek to duplicate those. Rather, the focus of this chapter will be on interpretation of the Irish spelling system for learners, who generally find its relationship to pronunciation to be frustratingly opaque. This will require some discussion of the sounds of Irish, but it will be kept minimal. Further details are provided in a number of studies, including Ó Siadhail (1989), Ó Dochartaigh (1987), Ó Raghallaigh (2013), the various dialect studies listed in the references from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) and Institiúid Teangeolaíochta Éireann (ITÉ) among others, as well as several online sources such as www.abair.ie and www.foclóir.ie.

2.1 Alphabet and pronunciation

Irish is written with the same alphabet as English, but normally only the following letters are used:

 a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u 

Other letters appear occasionally in English loanwords, especially j and v (e.g., jab–‘job’; vóta–‘vote,’ also sometimes spelled bhóta). Notice that there is no letter k. The sound represented by k in English is always written in Irish with a c. Moreover, the Irish sounds spelled with c are always pronounced ‘hard,’ i.e., like cat rather than city.

Many language learners tend to start from the written forms and equate spellings directly with sounds, often relying on what they know of English spellings and the sounds they represent. This can be counterproductive in the case of Irish, because the sound inventories of the two languages are quite different and, accordingly, the values of seemingly familiar letters of the alphabet can be subtly (or greatly) distinct from what those same letters represent in English, just as letters like j or sequences like ch can stand for very different sounds in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Swedish, or Malagasy, to name just a few examples.

Since spelling is a cultural artifact imposed on spoken forms by the society using the language, it is useful to understand the sound system independently from its representation in writing, in the way children acquire their home language. Then the values of the letters used to represent sounds visually will make greater sense.

Accordingly, we will start with a brief overview of the most significant features of the Irish sound system, emphasizing the ways it differs from that of English. Once the distinctive sound patterns have been introduced, spelling rules will be presented. In referring to spellings, the letters representing particular spellings will be presented in italic font; references to sounds will use the conventional symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), enclosed in brackets [ ] or / /. Thus, a refers to the letter, regardless of how it is pronounced, which can vary in each language (consider the different pronunciations of the letter a in English cat, father, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Background
• 1. Dialects of Irish
• 2. Sounds and spellings
• 3. Initial mutations
• 4. Terminology
• Grammar I: Sentence basics
• 5. Basic word order
• 6. Non-declarative sentences
• 7. Being and having
• 8. Focus and emphasis with cleft sentences
• Grammar II: Building blocks – major constituents
• 9. Verbs and verb phrases
• 10. Irregular verbs
• 11. Personal endings
• 12. Impersonal forms
• 13. Verbal nouns and adjectives
• 14. The syntax of verbal nouns and adjectives: Expressions of aspect
• 15. Mood
• 16. Nouns and noun phrases
• 17. Pronouns
• Grammar III: Building the phrase Modifiers and adjuncts
• 18. Adjectives
• 19. Determiners
• 20. Numbers
• 21. Adverbs
• 22. Prepositions
• Grammar IV: Complex sentences
• 23. Coordinate, complement, and adjunct clauses
• 24. Relative clauses
• 25. Conditionals
• Concluding chapters: Extra-sentential material
• 26. Names
• 27. Formulaic phrases and discourse markers
• References
• Index