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Excellent idea! It would be very interesting to hear a native speaker’s point of view. Out of curiosity, I ran a Google search on ‘an ionad pobail’ and ‘an lucht féachana’ in the genitive case (both masculine nouns) and the results are really split down the middle, you get both ‘an ionaid phobail’ and ‘an ionaid pobail’, as well as ‘an luchta fhéachana’ and ‘an luchta féachana’, including based on texts published by government bodies.
Wow. Most of ya’ll er over my head…for now.🙃 Thank you SO much for your info and opinions, and thanks to Lughaidh for checking Facebook—it’d be real neat if you get an answer from a native! But, either way, thank you.
I got answers here. Actually it’s not clear at all, one would find everything and its opposite, even in books!
(I hope this link works)
Thank you! I’ll check it out. And if it still isn’t real clear, I’ll just err on the side of the simpler, unlenited version. I just realized I might be over-thinking it (as I tend to do🤣) and turn out sounding like it does when someone tries too hard in English and ends up doing it wrong/weird…like “You did a [color=blue]well[/color] job,”😒 or “John and [color=blue]I’s[/color] dog.” or something.🤦ðŸ»â€â™€ï¸ Thanks. I can’t describe how much I like this forum and appreciate all the time and help. I hope I can learn enough one day to help others on Daltai too!
As I see it, the point in 10.2.9 cited by Darán ó Dochartaigh is as good an answer as any, and it seems like the vast majority of the people in that thread say that you would not lenite in these cases. Even one of the people who said that you would later reversed his answer. It’s possible that certain speakers in certain dialects would do it, but I doubt that this makes up a significant number of people.
Actually, when I see how native speakers write on Facebook (I can’t say about the way they speak, since I don’t live in Ireland), with obvious mistakes most of the time, I’m not surprised that they would drop the lenition in phrases like “doras an tseomra suí”, actually they often drop lenitions in cases that are way simpler and more basic than that.
I’m afraid that the last generation that spoke Irish “without mistake” is the generation that got English from school only or even later, ie. people who are 90 years old or so (eg. John Ghráinne). The next generations are bilingual from birth and it’s easy to see that their grammar is much “looser” than that of the precedent generation.Normally I’m not a prescriptivist but when I see that so many grammar rules have become optional, I think it’s not a good sign. If only declensions were disappearing, it would be ok (it happened in the Brythonic languages more than 1000 years ago) to me, but it looks like most features of the languages are becoming “optional”, ie. are being forgotten… and loads of words and idioms too.
I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but I don’t feel comfortable blaming careless Internet speech. My sense is that this is something most people haven’t been doing for quite a while. It’s not necessarily a surprise that good ol’ Munster boys like Gearóid think this is a thing.
As I’m sure you know, a *lot* of people on GA are not native speakers, even if many of them sort of.. pretend to be. “Native speaker” itself is a pretty tricky designation. If you were raised early on with Irish but didn’t really speak it much from a teenager onward and it’s obvious that you’re quite rusty, are you still a native speaker? According to some definitions you would be, but in my opinion, not in a way that really matters, at least if we’re talking about your ability to authoritatively comment on rules such as this. Gearóid is a native. It’s a shame Lílis or Pádraig ó Cíobháin had nothing to say about it.
But yes, I can usually count several mistakes in most posts in the group and I agree with the conclusion that even many of this and probably even the previous generations of legitimately native speakers make plenty of mistakes that the generation you reference would not have made. To me, the distressing ones are those of syntax. You can strip a language of quite a few “superficial” rules and it will still likely retain its essence, but when you’re using Irish words with essentially English syntax, it seems like one should ask themselves what is the point.
As I’m sure you know, a *lot* of people on GA are not native speakers, even if many of them sort of.. pretend to be.
Here I’m not talking about people who claim they are native speakers, but about people who *are* native speakers from the Gaeltacht, because they are kind of “famous” at least in the ” Irish cultural world” (I don’t know if this is proper English).
And they aren’t people who answered in the thread, if you want to know.“Native speaker” itself is a pretty tricky designation. If you were raised early on with Irish but didn’t really speak it much from a teenager onward and it’s obvious that you’re quite rusty, are you still a native speaker?
the people I refered to are people who live in the Gaeltacht and who use it everyday.
But yes, I can usually count several mistakes in most posts in the group
I’ve no problem with that, it’s normal and I’m sure I also make mistakes (sometimes I see some, myself, when I see my posts again a few days later), and on top of that, I know my Irish must be unnatural to native speakers. It’s understandable but I’m sure I often don’t say things in the way Gaeltacht speakers would say them.
There are a few cases where I’m disturbed when I see mistakes:
– on signs and official documents, learning books or videos and “reference material” in general
– when a learner asks a question and someone who thinks he/she knows gives a wrong answer (it’s even worse when he gets 10 answers and when at least half of them are wrong – it makes Irish look even harder to learners, because they’ll find contradictions between what they’ve been told and what they find in books and won’t understand why)
– when Gaeltacht native speakers make “basic mistakes” (that can’t be typos). It makes me sad because it means even the “best speakers” or those who should be the most reliable speakers make such mistakes. Very worrying for the future of the language…Since I haven’t found the solution in grammar books, I’ve just guessed it was the same thing after genitive singular masculine nouns as after nominative singular feminine nouns since they behave in the same way in most points of view. But maybe I’m wrong.
You already cited the rules: lenition after masculine genitives ending in slender consonant only:
So, in an tseomra suí, suí is unlenited because seomra ends in -a.A problem is an mhic tíre. You could expect lenition but there is none. (at least in examples in Nua-Chorpas or logainmneacha: Clais an Mhic Tíre)
Perhaps, mac tíre is too lexicalized a noun, so though there’s (sometimes) declension of mac, tíre is unchanged.
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