kevin wrote:Hope I didn't make too stupid mistakes, because there's quite some tiredness on me.
The only "stupid" mistake I saw was *
máhair for
máthair. Other than that, as Ciarán says, very good indeed.
Ciarán wrote:I made a choice to use the simple present in Irish, as that was what it was in English (and it may be said that it sounds odd in Irish, but it does in English too).
Consider the source: As I said, this is an extract from
Teach Yourself Latvian. Latvian lacks a progressive construction, so one of the reasons for the simple present throughout was to remind English-speakers how to translate correctly. For Irish, you'd do exactly the opposite, since if anything the progressive is more used there than in Standard English.
Now that you've done all the heavy lifting of looking up the vocabulary, Kevin, I recommend as an exercise going through the paragraph again and rewriting it with the progressive throughout.
Ciarán wrote:I used "suím", which is much less common than "beith i do shuí"
So much less so that I don't recall ever seeing it in writing from native speakers. Same goes for
cócarálann. (Though that could be a dialectal preference; I hear a lot of complaints about the abuse of -
áil verbs from Connemara speakers.) The verbal noun
cócaireacht, however, is perfectly common.
Ciarán wrote:kevin wrote:Ólaimid caife ar an mbricfeasta.
Grammatically, fine. Idiomatically, no idea. Linguoboy?
I'm not the best person to ask, as I would say
um bricfeast. I think
ar replaces
um in non-Munster dialects. How would you say "in the evening"?
Ciarán wrote:Two things about "shláintiúil": for one thing, my understanding of how to work adjectives in Irish is one of my worst areas (I working on it), but I don't think there's lenition on an adjective modifying a singular masculine noun ("muga"). I could be (and very probably am) wrong about that, hopefully linguoboy will enlighten us both. Secondly, I felt "folláin" would be a better translation, based on what I interpreted "healthy" to mean here.
I agree on
folláin being superior to
sláintiúil when talking about food. I can't see a reason for the lenition in kevin's version either unless he literally interpreted this as "a mug of healthy beer" and thought for some reason the adjective needed to be lenited after
beoir (which it would if it weren't in the genitive).
Speaking of adjective agreement, well done on
súile lán, a Chaoimhín; whether by accident or design, you managed to inflect this correctly for the dual.
On word choice, I think
lasair is better than
bladhm, since the latter can also mean "flare (up)". The derviation of
éadrom is "not heavy (
trom)". You don't use it with colours and I don't think it can be used here, either; I would say
lag "weak". (This adjective can also be prefixed--cf.
lagsholas "dim light"--but that sounds
very literary.)
For "cry", I would prefer
goil to
caoin, but that may be simply my interpretation of the scene.
Caoin means, among other things, a wail of lament for the dead (cf.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keen#Etymology_2) and it seems too strong here;
goil is a softer sort of weeping.
Táim aon intinn leat, a Chiaráin, on the use of articles before
tae and
máthair. In general, Irish is more fond of them than Standard English. Also on the use of
in aice and
ar sise, though
ortsa sounds unnecessarily emphatic. That is, if I were going to use it, I'd probably also front it, i.e. "Is mar gheall ortsa a bhím ag gol."
I hope I haven't missed anything. Tá tuirse ormsa leis.
"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