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- Topic: Irish >
- "Tá im agam."
11 Comments
As opposed to "táim agam", which is the vaguely nonsensical "I am at me".
I actually don't understand why she says "eem." I've always heard it pronounced as "ihm," and there's no fada on the i.
Short vowels developed into long vowels in monosyllabic words ending in m,rr,ll,nn.
The spelling of many Irish words reflects their pronunciation in Classical Irish.
Both the Munster and Connacht examples on teanglann.ie use the long "eem" pronunciation.
I also learned to pronounce im "as written (i.e. "ihm"), and I don't plan to change that, but I guess I need to learn to recognize "eem" when I hear other people say it.
Oooooo... Tá im agam, I just found imported IRISH BUTTER in my market in south Florida, USA, yesterday!! Yay!!
(I would have said "I have Irish butter" but I'm new and don't want to butcher this BEAUTIFUL language.
It has the same Proto-Indo-European ancestor as does Latin unguen (“fat”, “grease”).
Why only butter ? I have a butter. Is this sentence wrong? Why ? I am Polish and I learn English and Gaeigle
"butter" is usually considered a "mass noun" in English, so it is not used with an indefinite article.
As SatharnPHL said, since "butter" is a substance, it is treated as a mass noun rather than a count noun. As such, it only takes the indefinite article when it's divided into units, such as "a stick of butter" or "a pat of butter". Really, the indefinite article refers to the unit rather than the substance.
