Helloy everyone,

i will start by introducing myself since i'm new on this forum.

My name is Jacque (Jack) and i've been living in Montreal, Quebec. I have been studying languages for the past 2 years in a CEGEP (it is an acronym of 'Centre d'Étude Générale Et Professionnel') which a post-secondary educationnal institution.

Lately, I had a research to do about the morphology and syntax of a language 9try to guess which one I decided to do my research on!).

I have something which is bugging me lately and it is the
't-' case like in this example :

an t-oráiste

Well, as i can understand it mostly occur when the determiner 'an' precede a word starting with a vowel, but I've looked at alot of data and i've found other samples (mainly on this site) where it is not used :

an ubh

I haven't been able to find other example of it but i would like to know, if anyone knows, the reason of it?

Is it that my hypothesis was not the good one?
Or is there an exception?
Does the grammatical case (Nominative, Dative, Genetive, etc.) have any influence on it?

Thanks for your answer. Feel free to use morphological/syntactical terms to explain it!

(Message edited by trev on May 16, 2009)

Vowel-fronted feminine nouns need no t- when they follow an, whereas masculine ones do.
Masculine:
an t-urlár
Feminine:
an ubh

Conversely, s-fronted words that are feminine take a prefixed t when they follow an (but no hyphen).
Masculine:
an seomra
Feminine:
an tsráid

Basically, it is all about the gender and consonants/vowels.

Thank you very much!