"Fear, bean, cailín agus buachaill."
Translation:A man, a woman, a girl and a boy.
35 Comments
I wrote "A man, woman, girl and boy." and it said I was wrong, but in English it's okay to use one indefinite article in the beginning of a list if all the things in the list use the same one...
This is Irish, not English :P It at least makes it easier to type it without having to remember to use the in/definate articles.
That's not a terribly helpful answer. If the translation is correct then it should count it as correct, but it counted it as wrong, so it should be fixed. It seems from a reply further down that it has been corrected.
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It either A man, a woman, a girl and a boy or man, woman, girl and boy
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I'm a beginner too, but from what I understand, pronunciation and phonetics in Celtic languages differ immensely from those in Romance or Germanic languages - "broad" and "slender" consonants, glide vowels - like "ea" in "fear" being pronounced as "farr" - and a fun little trick "h" does where it isn't actually a letter, but a function which changes how consonants around it are pronounced.
In this case, it may possibly have to do with the initial consonant sound of the words... or it could be a quirk that one just has to get used to - unintuitive as it all may sound to Sasanach ears.
Keep at it!
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Of course, the 'h' is down to difficulties in producing diacritics in typing. Originally, the lenition was shown by putting a dot (séimhithe`* not sure if it's standard but pronounced by my mother as 'shave-ih-huh') above the consonant (which goes back to Latin, it was the equivalent of crossing a letter out). bh, ch, dh, fh, gh, mh, ph, sh th should really be something like ḃ, ċ, ḋ, ḟ, ġ, ṁ, ṗ, ṡ, ṫ respectively. It looks better on the insular script. I suspect that's why the top of the B and D slope down and the F, G, S, and T have flat tops. It's not as pretty but it's easier just to tack on a 'h'.
`*séiṁiṫe?
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The mark is called ponc séimhithe (“dot of lenition”). Séimhithe itself is the genitive declension of séimhiú (“lenition”).
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Check out erinsweb.com it explains it. With different consonants in front or behind will change how vowels sound. Irish is really difficult.
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Erin's web sounded like a fourteen-year-old Canadian girl's webpage until I remembered that Erin is a poetic name for Ireland. Sorry, just struck me as funny.
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with and without! Irish doesn't have indefinite article, so where you'd put a in English you don't put anything in Irish. When you translate from Irish in English you should think if in English you need the indefinite article or not.
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go raimh maith agat
Lingotín faoi do choinne
FTFY :D
(Anyone know if there's a more informal thank you to match with 'cheers'? Welsh has 'ta' but I think they just nicked that from English...)
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Proper Irish uses polysyndetic coördination — each pair of items in a list of items should be separated by an agus (or is ) without any commas.
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Plenty of people don't. I think it's the people who programmed it, rather than the Irish language itself. But, for this sort of sentence, the Oxford comma doesn't make too much of a difference, so it's fine either way. It's only when the sentences can get ambiguous that it really makes a difference.
I typed it with one and it accepted it, so whatever works, I guess.
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You don't. Irish only has a word for The. If you want to say A woman, you just say Woman (bean). It's the same in Welsh.
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Had a laugh here; don't know if anyone else is experiencing this - my Mac seems to know which language you're typing in and throws a red line under spelling errors. Works with all the Duo languages so far. Tonight finally introducing it to Gaeilge, and everything's getting a red line, incorrect or not. Computer's confused :)
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first non-germanic non-italic languange (on Duo), your mac is scurred
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I use predictive text on my phone so I can kind of cheat on spelling if the keyboad for that language is supported. And for Romance languages, you can often do a vague shape (swype-like input) of the English word (e.g. intelligence) and it will just write the Spanish word (inteligencia) anyway. On the Irish course, I don't have support for Irish so I have to type letter-by-letter. Which is probably better because Irish spelling is something I definitely need to get the hang of.
Searious, it didnt accept my awnser and the only thing I messed up on was spelling woman with a 'e'
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There are no indefinite articles in Irish — no analogues for either “a” or “an”.
So is it bean or bhean? I've seen both but im really confused on which one it is
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The base word is bean. The application of lenition to bean to form bhean occurs in several grammatical situations.