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I’m currently making a deck of Tinycards flashcards to help me learn/understand the lyrics of “Óró ‘Se Do Bheatha ‘Bhaile.” This has presented me with the opportunity to do what I call my “sentence projects,” where I analyze each word and try to understand the overall sentence structure. The main line of this song is kinda stumping to me. I know that the title is a way of saying “Welcome home,” but that apparently the literal translation is “Oro! It’s your home life!,” but (from what I’ve researched), shouldn’t it be said, “Óró! ‘Sé do bheatha ‘bhaile [color=blue]é[/color]…with an echoing pronoun? Another possibility I thought of is maybe it’s [color=purple]actually[/color] saying, “Oro! Home is your life”? That’s the only way I can account right now for the lack of another “é” on the end. I also know it’s a song; so maybe the grammar isn’t exact (I mean, “There ain’t no crawdads in this lake” isn’t exactly perfect English grammar either, but it’s a line from classic American song, so maybe it something like that? I know I’m over analyzing, but I can’t help myself.🙂
“Sé do bheatha” or also “Dé do bheatha” means “welcome!”. ‘Bhaile is simply a contracted spelling of “abhaile” or “home” (where to?), not the genitive case of the word. You could also say things like “Sé do bheatha chuig an gcruinniú” (You’re welcome to the meeting).
There’s an explanation at Akerbeltz (for the similar Scottish Gaelic version of Sé/Dé do bheatha):
http://www.akerbeltz.org/index.php?title=Jesus_is_life?
So, originally in Old Irish: rotbia de bethu, lit. “[There] will(shall)-be-to-you [plenty] of life”
It is an idiom. It is not a copula sentence at all. And (as Onuvanja already stated) ‘bhaile (abhaile) isn’t a noun here but an adverb, “at home”.
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