Hi,
has anyone a list of dative forms as say in general usage 2/3 centuries ago?

Failing that, any rules for back propagating/reconstructing the case?

thanks,
Barney

> Failing that, any rules for back
> propagating/reconstructing the case?

Hey, the dative isn't dead yet! It's still in general use (although probably only in some dialects) on some nouns, mostly those that denote paired body parts: ears, hands, and the like: cluas > i do chluais, lámh > le mo láimh, and so on. They all form a subgroup of the second declension and they're all feminine. Funnily enough, bróg also belongs in this category (dative: bróig) even though it isn't a body part.

Another noun that's still holding on to its dative is Éire (dative: Éirinn).

Then again, maybe you already knew this.

Mbm,
like your site's idea of guessing the gender and declension of nouns, although I feel that the rules fall down if one takes the rules too literally. For example, the word for baker (and a lot of more modern agentive suffixes) are slender in the caighdeán, but can be broad in the dialects (like in Mayo). It seems to me that knowing how to generate the cases via the clue that the final word gives is what one is really after. You know this, but some learners tend to get hung up on such rules, and forget they are contingent.

As for the dative, I know one can make it when one has a feminine noun that ends broad, say fuinneog, so one can go fuinneoig for dative and fuinneoige for genetive.

My interest is for other nouns like críoch which may have have datives like crích. Irish does not seem to like final palatised fricatives so much now, so I guess such examples are rare. It is not a massive job to learn the to regenerate them (1st declension via 'u-colouration'), but I'm not qualified to jump between old irish and 18th century irish in one bound for every single word, so I hoped someone would have a list.

The gov is supposed to be making the DIL available electronically by 2008. Wont hold my breath!

> [...] nouns like críoch which may have
> [had] datives like crích

Actually, crích sort of still is the dative of críoch - at least in the set phrase "rud a chur i gcrích" - to complete something, to bring something to completion.

Gabho mo leithscéal, the date is 2006 for compleation on the DIL

http://www.arts.ulst.ac.uk/lanlit/irish/research/projects/edil.html

Unfortunatly, Irish projects like these dont get finished, so we may never see the result. Anyone recall the speech synthesiser?

plus, and to show how well turned over irish records are, they found this while digging...http://news.ulster.ac.uk/releases/2005/1892.html


I must have taken crích from memory of seeing it written