Is dócha ná tuigim féin cad tá á rá agam!

I didn't know they had a connected etymology, thanks for that. I just meant in the language today they are different
particles basically one eclipses and takes the dependent form and the other just prefixes h.

Usually in Munster Irish, I think, you have ná for verbs and nách for the copula, although I know in Kerry this
is less strict than in Cork, c.f. The books of Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé, or just regular people from Corca Dhuibhne I guess.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

Nínim acht a' caitheamh mo thuairime fhéinig chúghaibh anso, gan amhras dh'fhéadfainn ' bheith cam leis. Dob'fhéidir go mbeidh tuairisg níos feárr aige Lughaidh.

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

As far as I know, the "ná" Munster speakers use as the negative relative might be the same as the negative used before imperative (that prefixes h to vowels too). I'm not sure it's old.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

This is where you lose me. Nádh represents Old Irish /ˈnaːð/. /ð/ and /ɣ/ fell together as the latter in Middle Irish. But where does the leap from /ɣ/ > /x/ come in? There was no systematic devoicing of fricatives in final position Irish (unlike in, say, German). The only other example I can think of where /ð/ > /x/ is in the third-person conditional/imperfect form of the verb, e.g. bhíodh /vʹiːx/. But this happens in dialects with nach and ná alike. Moreover, there's not much phonetic similarity between the two environments (i.e. an unstressed monosyllable and a suffix which can appear on both tonic and posttonic syllables), nor enough parallelism between the morphemes (i.e. a prefixed verbal partical and a verb ending) that spreading by analogy seems very plausible. (Incidentally, the examples I know of where it yields /uː/ all involve adha, not adh alone, e.g. bunadhas > bunús, Donnchadha > /doNxuː/.)

Mind you, I don't have a better hypothesis to hand, but then I don't know Irish historical morphosyntax well enough to know what alternative possibilities are available. Couldn't the /x/ in /naːx/ have the same source as the Ulster/Gaelic negative particle cha(n)? And where does the negative imperative ná that Lughaidh mentions come from, by the way?

I agree with you. Nách may as simply be a mixture of nach and ná...



I think the -ch of "nach" comes from the suffixed conjunction -ch, which means "and" (Latin -c/-que, Greek -te, etc).
Cha(n) comes from nícon, a synonym of ní



should be something old, because it exists in certain dialects of Breton, and the similiarities between Breton and Irish are very old things

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

It could be even more ancient.
The tongue position for 'n', 'd', and 'l' are very similar, and the negative imperative particle is 'lá' in both Arabic and Hebrew.
That could take the link back to pre 2000 BC.
Breton and Gaoluinn were intercomprehensible up to 500AD.

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Is mise, le meas, Deġeḃ.
Is Sasanaċ mé.
Tá beagán Gaoluinn agam.
As Béarla:
I see things differently.
I see things other people can't see.
Sometimes what I see is not there.
Some people call me crazy, and some of them are right.

Or it could not, because whereas Breton and Irish are nigh-universally regarded to be closely-related Indo-European languages, the position that Indo-European is ultimately related to Afro-Asiatic is still very much a minority view.

On a side note, the Hebrew negative imperative is not lá. In Biblical Hebrew, it was either לֹא (lo) or אַל ('al). In Modern Hebrew, only אַל is used.


"Citation please."

do you mean Irish is a Semitic language? or that Arabic and Hebrew are Celtic languages?



we have no idea what languages were spoken in Western Europe in 2000 BC...



we don't know and we can't know... the first Breton manuscript we know was written in about 750 AD. And what we know about the Irish language of that time is from Ogham inscriptions that are only a few words, mostly personal names. Impossible to make any conclusion from that.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

I am not saying that Celtic has major Afro-Asiatic roots, rather, if you take the OT with more than a pinch of salt, if you analyse the name Abraham, you get possibly ab Brahmin. The son of an Indian religious leader.
Hebrew, and Arabic have also Indo roots.

However, The Holy Land fell under Egyptian hegemony for many years, so that the Indo roots of Hebrew and Arabic were heavily diluted with north African.
Incidentally, Hebrew, and Arab are the same word.
One is written in hebrew, the other in Arabic, but even the 'alphabets' are very similar, and BOTH 'alphabets' are DEVOID of vowels.
Further, for someone familiar with Irish to differentiate analytically between a long 'a' and a long 'o', is pushing it. These two sounds are nearly identical.
There is a tradition that the Romans reported that their Gaulish interpreters had no difficulty in communicating with the Irish Celts. Neither did they consider them any other than Gaulish.

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Is mise, le meas, Deġeḃ.
Is Sasanaċ mé.
Tá beagán Gaoluinn agam.
As Béarla:
I see things differently.
I see things other people can't see.
Sometimes what I see is not there.
Some people call me crazy, and some of them are right.

No, but there is a tradition that Queen Scota, whom the Kerry Irish consider their ancestor was a refugee from Egypt, and was related to Tutankhamun.
Genetics of the region gives credance to the tale, and a major influx from Northern Africa could be the source of the coeliac disease which is common there.
The word could have come with Queen Scota.
What relevance has that? I am saying a similar sounding particle with the same meaning existed in another place, and there is an ancient traditional link with that place.
The traditions of the Roman invaders indicates from their silence, that there were not interpreters in the Godelic dialects, and the Brithonic interpreters sufficed.

_________________
Is mise, le meas, Deġeḃ.
Is Sasanaċ mé.
Tá beagán Gaoluinn agam.
As Béarla:
I see things differently.
I see things other people can't see.
Sometimes what I see is not there.
Some people call me crazy, and some of them are right.