A Chairde,
I have Rosetta Stone Level I and have seen the sentence "Dath dearg atá air." written (Lesson 3 Grammar section). Supposedly this is translated "The Color is red." or It is red."
Since I believe the Irish language is a
Verb/Subject/Object language...shouldn't the above RS sentence read "Tá dath dearg air"? My O'Dónaill Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla gives "dath" as the substantive (?noun) "Colour" and gives example "Tá dath donn air" "It is of a brown colour." I cannot find the RS sentence structure as I cited above.
Am I misunderstanding something here and if so what?
Is this a Munster Dialect version/construction of the sentence?
Can someone explain this in a simple fashion as I am a beginner in Irish and a very low level grammarian (<))

Also does anyone know what Level of RS would contain lessons for the use of the past and the future tenses of the verbs. This Level I of RS , though expensive, seems only to have the present tense content.
Hopefully I can learn Level One of RS and then go one to other verb tenses and the language vocabulary by only using the inexpensive language books I already have. Too much to hoe for , I suppose.

GRMA,
Jeannette

It is simply a focused structure : it is *red* (not blue).
Literally : (It is) a red colour that is on it.

You can say "Tá dath dearg air" or "tá sé dearg", it is the normal word-order.
It is not Munster, you could say that in all dialects.

ye its just emphasising


''color red is on it'' - red, it is
in a yoda style translation i spose

As Lughaidh's translation suggests, this can be viewed as a cleft sentence if that helps you to fit in into a VSO framework[*]. From that point of view, the main difference between clefting in English and in Irish is that the copula is always optional in Irish. That is to say, "Is dath dearg atá air" is an acceptable variant form of a focused sentence like this, but the is is frequently absent, as it is in the Rosetta Stone lesson.

Note that focussed sentences like this are often (always?) contrastive, as is generally the case with cleft sentences in English as well. ("It's red--not orange or purple--that is the colour of it.")


[*] Of course, syntactic analyses of Irish typically don't consider the copula to be a verb anyway, but that's a technicality of little use to the learner.

GRMMA ...A Lughaidh, Conchubharl, and Domhnaillín (should there be an "h" after the C and the D?)...for the explanation..and GRMMA all ... for
I have just searched back for the previous postings about RS and found, especially the ones dated Mar/Apr 2008, to be very helpful. I couldn't remember when or where I had seen those previous postings. Especially appreciated the remarks by Antaine, Do Chinniúint and Domhnaillín about the good points of this program and where Level 3 takes one. (;
Jeannette