I was just reviewing earlier chapters of Learning Irish and I noticed that in Lesson 7, which introduces inflecting adjectives that modify plural nouns, two sentences appear that don't inflect the adjectives the way the book says they should:

'Bíonn cait dhall mar sin go minic.'

And:

'Bhí neart daoine soibhir anseo.'

I'd expect 'dhall' to be 'dhalla' and 'soibhir' to be 'soibhre', although the book hasn't dealt with syncopation yet. Are these typos or is there a reason these particular adjectives don't inflect in these situations?

Go raibh maith agaibh.
-Mike

Hey Mike,

Good that you have noticed that. In short, this is a trait of Connemara Irish. Certain groups of adjectives tend to have the same form in both the singular and plural. In particular, adjectives that end with m, nn, ll, rr rarely change at all, that is e.g. cam, dall, gann, gearr always have a broad final consonant (e.g. even in the masculine genitive) and do not add -a in the plural. Note also that in Connemara Irish they all have a long vowel (e.g. mall - long back a, lom - long u, etc.).

Another group is two-syllable adjectives ending with a slender consonant (dílis, láidir, soibhir, milis, teirm, socair, fiáin, etc.). They also mostly have only one form for all cases.

I took this from Tomás de Bhaldraithe's Morphology.

Are there not also issues of predicative use here, too?

Ni rabh's agam sin, grma a chairde.

OBuadhaigh :

the 2nd sentence may be predicative or not :
'Bhí neart daoine soibhir anseo.'
= There were many rich people here, or
Many people were rich here.

in the 1st one, though, because of the lenition we know that the adjective is attributive:
'Bíonn cait dhall mar sin go minic.'
= blind cats are often like that.

Thanks! That makes things a lot more clear.

I think it's odd that Ó Siadhail would use examples like that without any explanation. Oh well, maybe it's in a footnote somewhere...

quote:

Are there not also issues of predicative use here, too?

I know what Mike meant with 'soibhir' used in a funny way in this chapter. The actual sentence is 'níl siad soibhir cé go bhfuil go leor feilméaraí soibhir agus daoine uaisle anseo'. From this, one concludes that 'soibhir' is used attributively just as 'uaisle' (which, interestingly, should also be unchanged if one is to follow the trends described in the Morphology).