Part of the problem is the way that Standard Irish is resorted to to "solve" disputed questions - as if the Standard had any authority beyond the extent to which it embodies what is actually good Irish on the ground in the Gaelthact. Quite often on this forum, you read someone saying "Ó Dónaill says X", as if that solves the question - when Ó Dónaill was not including his own personal knowledge of Ulster dialect in each entry in his dictionary - but working off a "standard" drawn up by a committee, including non-native speakers, in Dublin. An entry in FGB doesn't prove anything. Exhaustive research in Tobar na Gaedhilge and similar sources might.

We are faced with a situation where "dynamic" lenition is used on the ground in real Irish, although not necessarily the same in all examples in every part of the country. This of course would be why a Standard was cobbled together - in order to provide a resource where a definite answer to knotty issues could be found.

Cur cogaidh ar - to make war on. No lenition because "war in general" is meant here. Not a particular war. If a particular war is meant - it would be cur choghaidh.

Culaith sagairt - a priest's vestments vs. culaith shagairt - vestments for a particular priest.

Ar bruach na habhann - on the riverbank (just general - like "on the seashore"). Ar bhruach na habhann - on the bank of the river, as opposed to in the river (more particular).

Céad bó ar cnoc - 100 cows on a mountain, but not on a paricular mountain - just up in the mountains. Céad bó ar chnoc - on a particular mountain.

Do chuadar abhaile gan cath - they went home without battle, without fighting. Gan chath - would mean "without a battle" and it would particularise it again.

But dynamic lenition is hard to get your head round, because there are so many counter examples:

obair shnáthaide - needlework (but no sense of "particular, individual needles").
Ag imirt cártaí and ag imirt chártaí - both found in literature...

You see the problem? It is easier to just look things up in Ó Dónaill, but that doesn't solve the problem at all.

The feeling I get from all this is that there is a pattern that developed to do with the séimhiú and another which involved the genitive, and what happened is that they interfered with each other as there is a lot going on (lenition/no lenition/suspension of lenition, grammatical gender, use/non-use/suspension of article, use of nominal form as adjective, use of genitivized noun as adjective, possibly even compounding) and only a limited few ways to express it all grammatically (séimhiú, article, word position, genitive inflexion)

basic concrete meanings follow expected ('unmarked') grammar rules, ex:
ar bhord -on a table

states and more abstract meanings get signaled by séimhiú suspension, ex:
ar bord -on board


In the next example, there is obair an tí where many would expect obair an thí. ('Teach' is 2nd declension so it's a bit of a tranny in a way, so this might have something to do with it). The lack of suspension of the ostensible inflection here means either a) the genitive intervened, b) lack of support for the above 'suspension thesis' above, or c) some other reason


This leads into obair baile vs. obair bhaile. Since obair is feminine, we would expect obair bhaile since that is the most direct and common practical context for use while 'homework' happens less often and to children mostly, so gets marked to show it's unusual


The last example is gloine fíona. Now we have five potential 'meanings' to get across here:
a glass full of wine -gloine fíona
a glass of [the type to hold] wine -gloine d'fhíon?
a wineglass -gloine fhíona
a glass made of wine (like a novelty thing) -gloine déanta ó fhíon?
glass-wine -gloine-fhíon?

I'm surely not the first (nor last) to be confused by all this.

If gloine fíona is the most grammatically normal/unmarked (since the séimhiú is less expected here), then one could say that the marked version gloine fhíona is the more abstract (and 'wineglass' is as it is a sort of categorisation as compared to the functional 'glass of wine'), then the adding of a séimhiú to a genitivized noun where it is not expected is itself a marker of greater abstraction. Whether the noun is being used as an adjective or not, I'm not sure, as all of this is liable to be confusing but I suspect it would add another layer of complexity to things. We see it happen on baininseach nouns and that is why it has come to our attention.


Thus the basic scheme is a follows:
Common case feminine nouns: lenition expected for concrete ideas, suspended for abstract ones
Genitive case feminine nouns: no lenition expected for concrete ideas, added for abstract ones

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Let's look at it again:

1. Some genitives are equivalent to adjectives.

Déad chailce - white teeth. Here chailce is adjectival in sense. Whereas déad cailce is a proper noun-like use of the genitive - teeth of chalk (why that means "pearly" I don't know, but that's a separate issue).

See the top of p351 in FGB. Culaith mhairnéalaigh is a "sailor suit" - the genitive is adjectival and it is just general in reference. Whereas culaith mairnéalaigh is "a sailor's uniform". Here it means "a uniform of a sailor" - and so it is not equivalent to an adjective at all. The difference in nuance is slight - but it is there.

Later on in the same entry: culaith capaill - horse trappings, harness - the English might have led you to expect the adjectival lenited genitive, but this is really "gear for a horse" and so noun-like, and without lenition.

2. Lenition also binds the noun phrase more tightly together.

Culaith mhairnéalaigh - "a sailor suit" - is a tightly bound phrase, whereas culaith mairnéalaigh is not bound in the same way.
Obair shnáthaide - needle-work - as a single noun phrase, and indeed hyphenatable in English as such (you could think of sailor-suit as kind of hyphenated in your mind, whether it is in fact so or not).

3. Dynamic lenition can particularise the reference.

Culaith shagairt - a particular priest's vestments.

4. The problem is that 3) and 1) kind of contradict each other. If O'Nolan is right that lenition particularises the reference in culaith shagairt - why doesn't culaith mhairnéalaigh particularise?

These seem to be two different things going on: adjectival use, which tightly binds the noun phrase, and the use of general vs. particular references.

As for verbal nouns - this is a whole subject in itself. I presume that lenition after the verbal noun is particular used when the verbal noun is a general word that gains meaning from its object. "Ag baint fhéir" - where the meaning of "baint" is quite unclear until you get to the noun. When it comes to "ag imirt", it's not so clear that the verbal noun is so meaningless without the noun, and you can find both lenition or lack of it on the cártaí.

By contrast "foghlaim" has a clear meaning on its own, and I've only found "ag foghlaim Gaelainne". I can only find "ag labhairt Gaelainne", also without lenition. Maybe because "labhairt" is clear in its meaning all on its own.

Let's apply these to homework: using principle 1) obair bhaile seems right, as it produces an adjectival genitive tightly bound to the noun. Using principle 3) however, obair bhaile might seem to mean "work for a home", whereas obair baile would just mean "work for home".

How these contradictory principles match up is a problem.

I'm on your side on this, believe me; I just added in the opinions to add more roughage to the discussion.

Your angle supports the idea of there being a concrete/practical/direct aspect (digging up potatoes) in counterpoint to an abstract/metaphoric/indirect aspect (digging up facts)




For me it's easy to get the concept, but I've been years coming up with language models. Instantations of specific examples are still confusing, tho. I would say, however, the cognitive model I've outlined above has a lot going of it, and also the pattern itself is tricky, so native speakers are not going to avail of it each and every time and the pattern could even be undergoing weakening, so not always be consistent.

Another thing to think about is that it corpus linguistics gives us the impression that each and every word has its own collocation(s) and colligation(s), so essentially, every word is in its own declension (to use an Irish analogy), and so, from that point of view, while a pattern may develop and become generalized, some words will resist global changes or will never express them, being seed originators of their own (look at leaba/leapa, mrá/mraoi etc). Language is not crystalline perfect, tho we would like it to grow, fractal like, in an mathematical and algorithmic manner. There will be exceptions, for different reasons.

That is why I am a supporter to digging, modelling and sifting and taking the most complicated or specifying elements of Irish and using them to shore up a weakening system

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Do you think gender of the left part makes a huge difference to any system there might be?


I'm thinking thru your post above

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Jaybe, Dinneen has obair snáthaide - without lenition.

So a lot of this stuff has always been unclear - and well over a century after the Gaelic Revival, remains to be pinned down properly.

Well, yes, I take it as read that the entire discussion is only about lenition after feminine nouns. An exception would be lenition after verbal nouns of either gender.

But what would that be? I suspect that its just less obvious for masculine ones, but it might operate too...

For example, assuming this schema operates:


then could we not spin it around and use a masculine word instead?

How about praghas?

What is the difference between praghas baile (say the price of a house) and praghas bhaile (the 'house price' for members of a club)?

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My understanding is that lenition occurs, if at all, after a feminine noun. Praghas bhaile - would just seem to be a mistake to me. I'm not comfortable with baile meaning "house". As far as I know, it doesn't mean house, so I don't really accept the example.

Where are you getting 'déad chailce' from? I see only 'déad cailce' in FGB. Since 'déad' is masc one would expect the latter. 'Pearly' would be metaphoric, it seems to me. If lenition is used where unusual it might be signaling metaphoric usage.



This seems to suggest that the 'tighter' relationship is the more concrete, the more sensual (in a sensory sense), the more 'real', as it were and this is even reflected in the softening of the boundaries between the two words



Since a person is not familiar with being fitted out like a horse (well, some people are...) the fittings would remain somewhat experientially distant to the speaker (if a horse were to speak Irish he might say 'culaith chapaill' indeed)



Again, the personal and particular is 'closer' and so the words become closer by melding at the edges. this is like how cognitively 'lom, bom, pom' is felt to be more round than 'zing, zang, zizzy' which feels more jaggedy



It looks to me as if we are seeing two subsets of the same thing -a 'sailor's suit' and a 'particular set of vestments' are more personal and closer in a sense of ownership than 'the uniform of a sailor' and 'priests' vestments'



There does indeed at a grammatical level. It seems to me that at a conceptual level they relate easier



I need to study the VN more about this before I can add much to the discussion



I need to process this as well.

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