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Maidir le clasáil choibhneasta indíreacha:
“The men in whose company I shall be”
“The woman whose husband I am meeting with”
“The thing that I will know about”Na fir a mbéidh mé a gcomhluadar iontu? nó a mbéidh mé i gcomhluadar iontu?
An bhean a mbualaim a fear chéile leis?
An rud a mbéidh a fhios agam faoi?😛
Ní chuirfinn mo léine air, ach b’fhéidir: “na fir a mbeidh mé ina gcomhluadar” agus “an bhean a mbuailfidh mé lena fear céile”?
I thought of that as well… So far I can’t really find any examples online that reflect this type of sentence. The closest I can find are things like “an bhean a bhfuil a mac sasta” or “an bord a lui an forc air”. There’s an added level to things like “the woman in whose car I am sitting” an bhean a bhfuil me im shui ina gluaistean? It seems like it’s missing something or totally wrong.
I agree that it’s probably “an bhean a mbuailfidh me lena fear ceile” rather than what I wrote, which sounds really weird when I read it back. And the first sentence I gave is probably a bad example because I’ve noticed that variations of the preposition “i” are often omitted in the case of indirect relative clauses. I just typed the first examples I could think of that seemed to offer the same paradigm: where the object of the relative clause is also the object of a preposition, rather than the subject or not having any prepositional relationship at all.
There’s an added level to things like “the woman in whose car I am sitting” an bhean a bhfuil me im shui ina gluaistean? It seems like it’s missing something or totally wrong.
Aye it’s “an bhean a bhfuil mé i mo shuì ina gluaisteàn”. Nothing is missing.
By the way I was thinking about another problem with “whose” in Irish, see this dialogue:
“A car hit the tree”
“Whose car?”You can’t say “whose car?” in Irish, have to say a full sentence like “cé leis an carr sin?” instead. As far as I know you can’t say “carr cé” in Irish 🙂
I suppose you could say “Cé leis é?” but you’d risk someone talking about the owner of the tree 😉
Also, could you confirm whether Onuvanja’s versions are correct? They sound better to me than what I had originally written but I’d like to be sure.
“na fir a mbeidh mé ina gcomhluadar” agus “an bhean a mbuailfidh mé lena fear céile”?
yeah they are right
“na fir a mbeidh mé ina gcomhluadar” agus “an bhean a mbuailfidh mé lena fear céile”?
yeah they are right
Is dócha gur sa gcaint dhéanfaí aon abairt den chineál sin a shimpliú, mar shampla “na fir sin, beidh mé ina gcomhluadar”. Mar sin, ní thiocfá ar a léitheid ach sa reachtaíocht. 🙂
“na fir sin, beidh mé ina gcomhluadar”.
it doesn’t mean the same thing. This means “these men, I’ll be in their company
na fir a mbeidh mé ina gcomhluadar = the men in whose company I will be (I don’t know if it’s proper English 🙂 )
Sea, Béarla cheart í, ach ní hé Béarla a cloistear ach sa reacaireacht, mar a deir Onuvanja. I ngnáthchaint deirtear “the men whose company I will be in” níos minice. Tá claon láidir ag cainteoir Béarla an réamhfhocal a chuir ag deireadh na habairt, cé nach bhfuil sé ceart cruinn (dé réir na rialacha scoile 😉
They are, really. But probably according to some “traditionalist” grammar rules (i.e. “Grammar Nazi” , cé nach bhfuil an téarma seo chomh deas), the preposition goes at the beginning of the dependent clause, I believe. No one actually talks like that in any part of the English speaking world though 😉
The original sentence is somewhat awkward, even though it’s technically correct. It was a simplified version of a line from a movie I was thinking about because I realized how difficult for me to render it in Irish. It’s from Return of the King (the movie).. Theoden says something like “I go now to my forefathers, in whose mighty company I shall know no shame” (that isn’t it exactly, but more or less).
Interesting to me that the (I am assuming) Munster forms you quote almost come close to the English syntax (or at least that used in speech). Not that they’re that much different, but I’m referring mainly to the modern trend of English speakers offsetting their relative clauses with “that” instead of “who, which, etc.” I wonder if this is actually because of influence from English or just a parallel or coincidental evolution within the Irish language.
Winston Churchill apparently responded to the prescriptivist “rule” of never ending a sentence in a preposition by saying: “That is a rule up with which we shall not put”.
😀 This is why most English speakers don’t do this anymore. I don’t know if English originally lacked the type of idioms (i.e. to put up with) that made this kind of construction problematic when dependent clauses came into play… But at this point it seems you don’t have to go very far before you run into a sentence which is neither practical nor eloquent with the initial-position preposition.
In Irish such “with whom” constructions are obligatory.
Cé leis a rabhais ag caint?
Cé do a dtugais an t-airgead?You can also say “Cé a rabhais ag caint leis” and “Cé a dtugais (Cé a dtug tù…) an t-airgead dò”. Btw that’s what Welsh and Breton and Cornish use too ; Scottish Gaelic has the 2 ways as Irish (I think) ; I think Manx only uses the way with the prepositional pronoun at the end.
Winston Churchill apparently responded to the prescriptivist “rule” of never ending a sentence in a preposition by saying: “That is a rule up with which we shall not put”.
😀 This is why most English speakers don’t do this anymore. I don’t know if English originally lacked the type of idioms (i.e. to put up with) that made this kind of construction problematic when dependent clauses came into play… But at this point it seems you don’t have to go very far before you run into a sentence which is neither practical nor eloquent with the initial-position preposition.
I remember Steven Pinker in his excellent book The Language Instinct explain how such prescriptivism was introduced in an attempt to ape Latin word order and grammar but that English is not Latin and that imposing Latin grammar strictures on English made no sense. In Latin, I think, and definitely in its daughter languages, one has no choice but to put the preposition next to the relative particle and you simply can’t have it dangling off the end of a sentence as in English.
Interesting! Thanks for the background. I studied Spanish in high school and while I internalized a lot of the basics, I never got as far as learning that type of construction, so that’s as far as my Latin-based language expertise goes.
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