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Here is where confusion will arise. I was taught Irish in Waterford so I had Munster Irish as a child.
At school, we would have learned ‘cad ina thaobh’ and also ‘cén fáth’. We would have been exposed to ‘cén fáth’ in the textbooks and the written standard.
Because of this, I believe that my teachers interchanged ‘cén fáth’ and ‘cad ina thaobh’ daily, to the point where we never realised that one way was standatd and the other way was a dialect. We were certainly never told. We presumed that it was just two different ways to say the same thing.
Similarly, I would have seen ‘cén fáth go raibh’ written as often as I would have seen ‘ cad ina thaobh go raibh’
Only later did I notice that ‘cad ina thaobh’ seemed to have vanised somewhat now that I was more exposed to the written standard and that ‘cén fáth a raibh’ seemed to have replace ‘go’ altogether.
To clarify my last question….and having learned Irish in Munster as a child I should know….but now I’m no longer certain of anything on this topic…..
In Munster Irish, can the ‘go’ replace ‘a’ for numerous question words/phrases or even in other types of sentences? It was mentioned that it had creeped into Connaucht, but only following ‘ cén fáth’.
Or is this interchange of ‘go’ and ‘a’ (in the munster dialect) only used following ‘why’ ?
In terms of dialect, would ‘go’ be used in Munster Irish for question terms other than ‘Cén fáth’?
Cá fhad, for example.Thank you for the help. Can I just ask for one further clarifacation on the point concerning ‘Go/a’ ?
Dialect aside, how should it be written in the standard? Cén fáth a raibh se ann or cén fáth go raibh sé ann?
I am finding this one very strange as to me ‘go’ and ‘a’ are very different particles and I am wondering how they came to mean the same thing in different dialects.
