In Peter O'Leary's translation of Matthew 22, I find: Cad a thuigeann sibh-se i dtaobh Chríost? Cé 'ro mac é? Agus dubhradar leis: Mac Dáibhid.


Why cé 'ro? Why not: cér mac é?

Would it be 'raibh' maybe? Cé raibh mac é?

The older translation is cé d'ar mac é?, so this may have something to do with it.

Old Christian Brothers has:

Cé'r a mac thú? Whose son are you?

Perhaps the o is a shortened go which is common in Munster.

(Message edited by seánw on February 13, 2010)

dinneen's dictionary has "cé ra díobh thu?" implying that cér could actually be "cé ra".

Cér a mac thú? - what page is this on in the old Christian Brothers' Grammar. I can't find it. Do you mean the old Green edition produced around 1900? Cér a mac thú? must be the same as the "cé ra" in Dinneen's. It is not a possessive "a", and is not a relative particle (and so not a shortened form of "go").

The trouble is you can read hundreds of pages of Irish before coming across one example of something like this. I might need to do a lot of reading to find any more examples.

Oh! I just saw! At http://wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Seadna.djvu/212, there is an example of cér díobh í in the non-proofread version of Séadna, but the image on the right shows the original to be "cé 'ro díobh í". It seems there is a vowel there, in Cork Irish at least.

quote:

Cér a mac thú? - what page is this on in the old Christian Brothers' Grammar.

This edition:

http://www.archive.org/details/graimearnagaedil00chriiala

Page 314.

Thanks, Seán. I see the old Christian Brothers' Grammar is essentially backing up what I found. Cé ro/Cér a - it's the same thing, but originally the particle would have been "ro".

I note that Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne says that there is either "cér" or "cér a" in Kerry.