How would I say in Irish:

The population of this place is 32,000.

How would I say that in Irish?

GRMA.

Tá daonra de 32000 san áit seo.

Thanks very much.

This site is terrific.

Can you tell me what the ''de'' means? Or what does it make the sense?


(Message edited by teanga on July 31, 2007)

I wuda said: 32,000 an méid daoine san áit seo

"de" very loosely translates as "of". As I'm sure you're aware already, there's different kinds of words in languages, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives. Both "de" in the Irish language and "of" in the English language are classified as prepositions. Prepositions are the hardest denomination of word to translate, simply because there's very rarely a one-to-one translation. Here's an example of a collision:

He is standing at the door = Tá sé ina sheasamh ag an ndoras
He threw the ball at me = Chaith sé an liathróid liom

In the first sentence, "at" is translated as "ag", while in the second it's translated as "le". ("liom" is a combination of "le" and "mé").

As for the English word, "of", this is probably the hardest word to translate into Irish, simply because there's so many ways of doing it in different contexts:

I'm scared of it = Tá eagla orm roimhe (roimh)
The Republic of Ireland = Poblacht na hÉireann (no preposition used)
He spoke of him = Labhair sé faoi (faoi)
The biggest part of it = An chuid is mó de (de)