"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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I'm guessing this is an apple each? Or are the women collectively eating a single apple. (In other words, is úll referring to each of the women in mná?)
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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So 'an' means 'the', so why does 'an nuachtán' mean 'the newspaper' yet 'an úll' doesn't mean 'the apple'?
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?
Probably because Duolingo doesn't know that you know that! 'Is' is a short version of 'agus,' but tbh it looks a little weird to write it in the middle of a normal (non-poetic) sentence. Kind of like answering the question 'Who's there?' with 'It is I, and I shall not stir from here until I shall speak with thy master. ) There's nothing grammatically wrong with my answer, but I wouldn't teach someone to talk like that. (Okay, maybe 'thy' is obsolete!)
In this sentence, you have two mini-sentences joined by 'and.' [The men read the newspaper] and [the women eat an apple]. You do each mini-sentence as though it were a sentence on its own.
Irish is called a VSO language because the normal word order in a sentence is Verb (shows doing or being) Subject (shows who/what is doing the verb) Object (shows who/what the action is being done to -- should really be called Rest of the Sentence).
So let's put the English words into the Irish word order:
(read-the men-the newspaper) and (eat-the women- an apple)
Now change the words to Irish:
(léann-na fir-an nuachtán) agus (itheann-na mná-úll)
or
Léann na fir an nuachtán agus itheann na mná úll.
I hope that answers your question.