2. Person Singular Conjugation in Munster Irish

Wee Falorie Man is right, though I would say that -ir is never the most common ending. You could definitely hear tiocfair, for example, but you’d be much more likely to hear tiocfaidh tú. But as the question is whether it still is used, the answer is definitely yes.

Wee Falorie Man is right, though I would say that -ir is never the most common ending.

I’m sure you’re right, Jonas. The person who taught me this, used synthetic endings more often than not, but that certainly doesn’t mean that the majority of people talk like him. He was in his mid-eighties, but I’m not sure if that had anything to do with it – maybe synthetic endings are less commonly used by younger speakers.

Very much so, especially in Múscraí. Less of a generation difference in Corca Dhuibhne where Irish is much stronger as a community language. In Múscraí, which sadly is no longer a fíor-Ghaeltacht, the influence of standard Irish in the schools is much more evident.

Younger speakers in Corca Dhuibhne definitely still use an bhfuilir and ná fuilir.
As Wee Falorie Man said, they are more common in the future.
Conas taoi is heard as a less common variant of Conas tánn tú, as Jonas said.
I think taoi was the original form the Bards used and that Táir evolved from generalising the “-fair”
ending of the future to the present.

That’s true, but I feel that that particular change was fairly gradual, whereas in Munster Irish this seems to have happened fairly rapidly. And I find this worrying because continuity and inter-generational transmission is so important to endangered languages.

Also, in many languages (German, for instance) the written form is more conservative than the actual spoken language and causes the language to undergo change at a slower pace. In Irish, a conservative written form was replaced by a modernised and simplified form.

I’m not sure that is true, actually. If you go back to the original An t-Oileánach, published in 1929 and written in dialectal Munster Irish by a man born in 1856, you will find that Tomás quite often use analytical forms in both the present and the future even when synhetic forms exist. He does so to a lesser extent that speakers today, but today we’re almost 100 years after the time when he wrote. He constantly uses synthetic forms in the past, as do every speakers I’ve ever met in Corca Dhuibhne. The same goes for Peig Sayers telling stories recorded in the late 1920, she also uses the “fidh tú” for the future.

In other words, what we have is precisely that fairly gradual change. There has been no change for the synthetic forms in the past, and both analytical and synthetic forms were in free variation 100 years ago, just as they are today. What we see in Corca Dhuibhne in this regard is the same change that has taken part in all other forms of Gaelic dialects (including Scotland and Isle of Man) and An Caighdeán, unknown to Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Peig Sayers, seems to play a very marginal role, if even that, in this development.

I know it was already essentially gone by the 1940s, it was even missing on some words in some dialects as early as the 1860s.
However I don’t know why it disappeared.