timgreathouse wrote:
Just out of curiosity, what about that line (with "dtitim") doesn't make sense? If you had to take a crack at translating that line into English as is, what would it translate to? Is the uncertainty because the language isn't terribly "common", or is it because it's just very complex? (I find this all really fascinating.)
I think it’s just because it sounds so odd. Grammatically, it makes sense, since all the words are in the right place and there aren’t any sentence elements present that couldn’t grammatically be present in this type of sentence—but when you think about it semantically, it breaks down a bit.
… go dtitim síos san spéir means either ‘till I fall down into the sky’ or ‘that I fall down into the sky’. The latter is actually a more accurate translation, since the former would more naturally have the verb in either the future tense or the subjunctive mood in Irish (
go dtitfidh mé or
go dtite mé), instead of a simple present tense. But I think this is a place where English is taking over, so many native speakers would not find it unnatural anymore to say
go dtitim for ‘until I fall’.
Quote:
And then finally... what would all four of the above lines look like in Gaelic script?
Ardaiġ mé suas ón dtalaṁ
go dtitim síos san spéir
Ardaiġ mé ón dtalaṁ
síos san spéir(This is using the traditional notation where lenited consonants are indicated by putting a dot over them. When writing in the Latin alphabet, and also sometimes when writing in the Gaelic script [though less commonly so in poetry and prose], the lenition is shown by writing an h after the consonant instead.)
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