"He has the clothes."
Translation:Tá na héadaí aige.
11 Comments
When you have a plural definite article (na) + noun, the noun gets a "h" affixed to it, if it begins with a vowel.
Also, for beginners getting frustrated with Irish eclipsis and lenition, it's worth saying it aloud and feeling what that "h" is doing. "Na éadai" with no consonant between the words makes you do either a glottal stop or slur the two together, like "nay-dee". The "h" helps the sentence flow much better.
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This is good to know, but to my knowledge there is no explanation in Eclipsis and Lenition that I am aware of. Might be a good idea to put that in somewhere, along with a one-at-a time introduction of lenition and eclipsis rules :-) I guess this is a rather challenging subject to teach as well as to learn.
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The h-prefix is not eclipsis and it is not lenition, so it isn't explained in the tips & notes for those topics.
Eclipsis and lenitition are the two most common "initial mutations", but there are some others, such as this h-prefix.
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Like many other European languages, Irish uses a different definite article for plurals than for singular nouns ("le" and "les" in French, "el" and "los" in Spanish, etc). You can tell that na héadaí is plural because na is the plural definite article in the nominative case.
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and in other (non European) languages too, eg "te" and "nga" in Māori.
How do I know, that this noun is plural? It says "the clothes" which could be both, couldn't it?
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"clothes" is a plural noun in English - http://www.dictionary.com/browse/clothes