UniLang

Halò, a h-uile duine

I'm learning gaelic, I've encountered a grammartical problem while I was watching this video

http://www.learngaelic.net/look/index.jsp?b=MA27

I was studying the gaelic text, I saw the sentence "Bha esan a’ cur roth ùr air a’ bhaidhsagail."
I've figured out that the word baidhsagal is masculine and genitive, but the problem is, shouldn't it be dative after the preposition air?

Or could air require both dative and genitive?
What's the difference between dative and genitive here?

it does seem that baidhs(e)agal is usually spelled with a broad final -l, but honestly I wouldn't bat an eyelash if I saw someone using baidhs(e)agail as the nominative, in which case air a’ bhaidhs(e)agail would be the expected regular dative. with English loanwords there's a certain amount of flexibility in how their Gaelicized forms are spelled (see also: Am Faclair Beag's baidhseagal vs. LearnGaelic's baidhsagal).

some Google searching reveals that the broad version is definitely more common, but there are results for the slender form, including from the BBC and from Dàna, whose editing I probably trust more than the BBC's.

Sectori wrote:it does seem that baidhs(e)agal is usually spelled with a broad final -l, but honestly I wouldn't bat an eyelash if I saw someone using baidhs(e)agail as the nominative, in which case air a’ bhaidhs(e)agail would be the expected regular dative. with English loanwords there's a certain amount of flexibility in how their Gaelicized forms are spelled (see also: Am Faclair Beag's baidhseagal vs. LearnGaelic's baidhsagal).

some Google searching reveals that the broad version is definitely more common, but there are results for the slender form, including from the BBC and from Dàna, whose editing I probably trust more than the BBC's.

Thanks for answering about that, the problem bothers me for a while

Colin Mark's dictionary has baidhsagail as the nominative spelling, so that is one authoritative source supporting that spelling of it. Like Sectori said, with loanwords there can be some variation with the spelling.

The Look@ videos are produced by MG Alba, a Gaelic-medium production company in Stornoway that works in partnership with the BBC. They are not BBC proper. The writing of the scripts for those videos are excellent and the writer of this particular video is Peigi Townsend, a native Lewis speaker and published Gaelic language writer herself. You have no reason to suspect these Look@ videos of anything faulty or improper.