Multiturquoise wrote:Before breakfast I had a shower.
Roimh bhricfeasta thóg mé cith.
Traditional Irish doesn't allow you to freely front sentence elements without altering the syntax of the sentence. Most frequently what you have is a
cleft sentence formed with the help of the copula, i.e.:
Is roimh bhricfeasta a thóg mé cith. (Munster also:
Roim bricfeast is ea a thógas cithfholcadh.)
Now the copula is often dropped in this construction and the relative particle
a gets swallowed up by the
a in
bhricfeasta, so in speech this sentence actually sounds identical to yours. But it's important to understand the underlying grammar for cases where it won't. For instance, present habitual tense:
Roimh bhricfeasta a thógaim mé cith.where the verb isn't normally lenited outside of a relative clause.
Multiturquoise wrote:Before I left the house I put on my clothes.
Sular fhág mé an teach, chaith mé mo chuid éadaigh.
* This one was a bit confusing. Would the singular genitive "éadaigh" or the plural genitive "éadaí" be used for this?
Singular is idiomatic in this case.
Multiturquoise wrote:I brushed my teeth before I went to school.
Scuab mé mo chuid fiacla sula ndeachaigh mé ar scoil.* According to
this, mo chuid fiacla is possible but the usage of "cuid" kind of confuses me.
Cuid is optional here. It's most common before (a) mass nouns and abstracts like
fíon,
obair,
eolas and (b) plural count nouns. It's not used with body parts that come in pairs; here you would either modify the noun directly or use the dual, i.e.
mo shúile/
mo dhá súil "my (two) eyes".
Multiturquoise wrote:Before my first class I went to my locker.
Roimh mo chéad rang, chuaigh mé chuig mo locar.
See above.
Multiturquoise wrote:Before the class ended, the teacher gave us more homework.
Sular chríochnaigh an rang, thug ár múinteoir níos mó obair bhaile.
* What is the rule for a noun to be genitive after "níos mó"? I searched on Google with the terms "níos mó oibre" and "níos mó obair bhaile", typed "site:.ie" after each of them and I got results.
Traditionally
níos mó would be followed by the genitive. This makes sense when you realise it's really a contraction of
ní is mó "a thing that is more". But what follows it isn't
obair it's
obair bhaile, and that complicates things. There's a rule in Irish against having two genitive nouns in a row. Only the last noun in the series is actually in the genitive form; the noun before it remains in the nominative/accusative[*].
In summary:
níos mó oibreBUT
níos mó obair bhaile.
On a side note,
sular chríochnaigh an rang isn't incorrect, but sounds a little stilted. I'd probably say
roimh dheireadh an ranga "before the end of class" unless there's some reason to stress the process of the class coming to an end. But I'm more comfortable with the genitive than a lot of speakers.
One last thing: Why did you use a possessive before
múinteoir when the translation is "the teacher"?
Multiturquoise wrote:She told us to do the homework before tomorrow morning.
D'inis sí dúinn an obair bhaile a dhéanamh dúinn roimh mhaidin amárach.
An Irish object + verbal noun construction is like an infinitive clause in German (e.g.
die Hausarbeit zu machen); it comes at the end of the main clause, after all other objects. Moreover,
roimh mhaidin amárach belongs to the subclause, not the main clause (the doing is what is to happen before tomorrow morning, not the telling), so you can't split it off with an extraneous element.
[*] And takes lenition, where possible (a phenomenon known as the "functional genitive").
Obair can't be lenited, however, so that doesn't apply in this case.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons