Gumbi wrote:
kokoshneta wrote:
Ghoid tú mo chroí
‘you stole my heart’
The simple past tense would more commonly be used in Irish than the perfect tense here. Tá mo chroí goidte agat doesn’t flow nearly as well.
I don't see what's wrong with the latter. Both work in my opinion.
Yeah, sorry—‘doesn’t flow’ was bad wording, it’s too generic. As phrases, both work fien.
What I meant is that, for “You’ve stolen my heart” (where the focus is on the action of stealing in English), it sounds more natural to me to simply say
ghoid tú mo chroí in Irish, using the simple past. If you say
tá mo chroí goidte agat, the focus is on the resulting state that the heart is now in, rather than on the act of stealing it. In English, I might even translate that as simply “You have my heart”, or “My heart is in your hands” or something like that (though that leaves out the stealing bit altogether, of course).
Tá tú i ndiaidh/tar éis/th’éis mo chroí a ghoid(eadh) places what I feel is an undue and unneeded stress on the fact that the act of stealing has been carried out to its end as is now just completed.