I'm faced with trying to assimilate the meaning behind the following phrase, and could use some insight:

"Dath buí atá ar mo leabhar Gaeilge agus tá sé ar an gcathaoir i mo sheomra."

I can understand this as meaning: "Dath" yellow's on my Irish book and it's on the chair in my room.

Can somebody please help me understand the meaning behind "dath" in this case? My mind fills in that blank with "it's such that" or "There's" ... but I don't want to commit to that if it has a more appropriate meaning.

(Also, I don't wish to turn this into a beginner's Q&A forum and ruin it on you who are far beyond me in the study of Irish; I'm just not sure where else I can ask questions like this. Please point me elsewhere if there's a more appropriate forum for this, by all means, and I will gladly go there!)

GRMH

Dan

"My Irish book has a yellow colour (there is a yellow colour on my Irish book) and it is on the chair in my room."

Dath buí -- a yellow colour
atá -- which is
ar mo leabhar Gaeilge -- on my book [of] Irish (language)

agus -- and
tá sé -- it is
ar an gcathaoir -- on the chair
i mo sheomra -- in my room

Dath usually means colour but occasionally means "nothing! not a penny"
An bhfuil airgead agat? Have you any money?
Níl a dhath! I don't have its colour!

What we have here is a thing called "cleavage". In Irish, the most topical part of a sentence can be moved to the front. For instance, consider the English conversation:

Máire: What were you doing in their house? You were talking to Róisín!
Seán: I was talking to Pól!

This could naively be translated to Irish as:

Máire: Cad a bhí ar siúl agat ina dteach? Bhí tú ag labhairt le Róisín!
Seán: Bhí mé ag labhairt le Pól!

In true Irish, Sean would have used "cleavage" to get his point across:

Seán: Is le Pól a bhí mé ag labhairt!

The "is" is optional; he could have said:

Seán: Le Pól a bhí mé ag labhairt!

If he was not talking to Pól, but rather studying with him, he would have rearranged the "cleavage" to:

Ag déanamh staidéir le Pól a bhí mé!

Without exact context, the closest translation of your sentence would be:

My Irish book is yellow and it's on the chair in my room.

However, for some reason, "cleavage" has been used to bring the colour yellow to the front. Without context, we don't know why -- but perhaps the conversation went something like:

Seán: Tá dath gorm ar leabhar Gaeilge Phóil; d'fhág sé ar an mbus é inné!
Pól: Dath buí atá ar mo leabhar Gaeilge, agus tá sé ar an gcathaoir i mo sheomra.

(Message edited by Fear_na_mBróg on August 26, 2006)

A Dhan a chara,

Of course you can ask questions here, that is one of the points of this forum. I can't answer most of them, mind you, but there are many kind folk who can and gladly will.

Beir bua agus beannacht