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- "The men read the newspaper a…
"The men read the newspaper and the women eat an apple."
Translation:Léann na fir an nuachtán agus itheann na mná úll.
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If you can read the International Phonetic Alphabet, you can find the sounds in the Wikipedia article on Irish orthography.
When I've heard it it's always been mraw but I've only really heard Northern speakers. scilling's link is good and there is also a site called Forvo for native-speaker pronunciations in various languages.
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Can 'agus' not be interchanged with 'is'? I have seen it shortened as such before (certainly in Scottish Gaelic at least - maybe it doesn't work the same with Irish).
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The exercise asks you to translate "an apple", not "the apple".
It is also the case that masculine nouns that start with a vowel get a t-prefix after the singular definite article an (in the nominative case), so you get an t-úll (masculine) but an ubh (feminine).
Well, I chose two tranlations for.
The men read the newspaper and the women eat an apple
Léann na fir an nuachtán is itheann na mná úll and Léann na fir an nuachtán agus itheann na mná úll
The system counted it wrong because it only wanted the second but last I knew "is" is a short version of "agus". So why is it wrong that I chose both?
I answered "léann na fir an nuachtán agus itheann na bhan úll", having checked the spelling of "women" by hovering over the word and using the tip there. My answer was marked wrong and I was told that "Léann na fir an nuachtán agus itheann na mná úll." is the correct answer.
I have learnt that mná must be the more common plural than bhan, but why is bhan offered as an alternative if it will not be accepted as correct?
Having read the posts here, I see that a similar issue arises with the use of "is" instead of "agus".
I have reported this through the "My answer should be accepted" option. This note is to give a fuller explanation.
mná isn't "the more common plural than bhan"
Mná is the nominative plural of bean, ban is the genitive plural of bean, so due to the intracies of the way that people are counted in Irish, the Irish for "two women" is beirt bhan. But the genitive has no part in a sentence like "The men read the newspaper and the women eat an apple", so the correct answer is only itheann na mná.
You misunderstand the purpose of the "hints". They provide the equivalent of a dictionary lookup of a word, and where there is more than one word in the hints, it is up to you to recognize the context that the word is bing used in, and to choose the appropriate word - they aren't simply "alternative answers". If you want to see the "correct answer", you don't look at the hints, you click "Submit".
Thank you! :o) I haven't seen any genitives yet (only in the Basics) so hadn't picked up that. Is the change from ban to bhan similar to the mutations seen in Welsh?
In Welsh, there is a treiglad meddal (soft mutation) :
dog (m) =ci and two dogs = dau gi;
a cat (f) = cath and two cats = dwy gath.
Whilst I don't expect that Irish does exactly the same things (I can already see that it uses plural forms with numbers which Welsh doesn't) is the principle similar in that of the beginnings of words change after numbers?