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- "It is a dirty kitchen."
"It is a dirty kitchen."
Translation:Is cistin shalach í.
27 Comments
is shalach lenited because cistin is feminine? I don't recall seeing that before
Yes. Attributive adjectives agree with their nouns in case, number and gender, so shalach is lenited because cistin is feminine.
Why would cistin be lenited? - there isn't anything to cause lenition.
Feminine nouns in the nominative case are only lenited after the singular definite article an.
cistin - "(a) kitchen"
an chistin - "the kitchen"
na cistineacha - "the kitchens"
so all attributive adjectives modifying a feminine noun in the nominative case are lenited , even if the noun isn't?
I agree that it's really unsettling when noun and adjective don't do the same thing. It makes sense in Irish though, when you consider lenition as something different from gender/ number/ case. Lenition facilitated the flow of sound when certain letter combinations would have obstructed it (more info at nualeargais.ie under the chapter Initial Mutations). Seeing the cause as sound-related (ease of speech), rather than logic-related (grammatical function), helped me come to terms with the fact that an adjective can be lenited although its noun isn't.
??? The lenition of salach is logic-related in this case - it occrs solely because of the gender of the noun.
Why doesn't this sentence need the beginning reference pronoun as with "Is é namhaid phobail é"?
Because it doesn't contain a definite reference. Likewise, your sample sentence shouldn't include the first é.
If you wanted to say "It is the dirty kitchen", you could say:
Is í an chistin (chisteanach) shalach í. In this case, the first í is required for Munster and Connacht Irish, but not for Ulster.
590
In most cases you just have to learn it. Most nouns ending in a slender consonant, like cistin, are feminine, but there are some exceptions, notably nouns that refer to male people (e.g. athair, deartháir); also nouns ending in the suffix -ín are always masculine (even cailín despite meaning 'girl').
Not all nouns ending in ín are masculine - bráillín, laichín, muirín, are just a few examples.
Many of the terms for jobs or occupations end in -eoir or -óir - those words are all masculine - dlíodóir, feirmeoir, uaireadóir, bádóir, isireoir, etc.
There is a guide that will help you get the gender of most nouns right here.
Why is salach lenited? Does the DeNTaLS DoTS rule not work here? Because cistín ends with N and salach begins with S, but salach is still lenited
The DeNTaLS DoTS rule is not used with attributive adjectives.
http://nualeargais.ie/gnag/adjekt3.htm#Lenition
salach is an adjective, not a noun, so you wouldn't use it in that way to translate this sentence.
No. You are classifying a pronoun ("it") as a noun ("kitchen"), so you use the copula Is, not the verb bí (Tá).