Talk:Scottish Gaelic grammar
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[edit] Outdated
The approach taken on this page to Scottish Gaelic verbs is pretty obviously derived from outdated grammars that tried to fit this Goidelic language into the grammatical structures of Latin and Greek. The references chosen (Calder, Gillies) would make that clear even if much of the description of verbs is just plain wrong: Verbs are said to have two simple tenses, but almost all Gaelic verbs have 3 tenses; the exceptions are a small number of defective verbs (which have either simple 1 or 2 simple tenses) and the verb "bith" (which has 4). Verbs are said to have "active" and "passive" voice; that might be an acceptable description for transitive verbs, but the voice called "passive" exists also for intransitive verbs like "go" and "be" so calling it "passive" doesn't work and we normally talk about "active" and "impersonal". Verbs are said to have three moods, but actually have only two moods: indicative and imperative. There is no "subjunctive" mood. The indicative mode has three modes: independant, relative, and Dependant (the first two or these are identical in all but one tense). There are at least twice as many "compound tenses" as stated in the article (of course they aren't really tenses at all, but combinations of tense and aspect, but "cpmpound tense" is used in the article and is an acceptable term). As well as these errors, the article doesn't contain any description of the Gaelic verbal noun. It is quite impossible to understand the Gaelic verb system without understanding the uses of verbal nouns, since they are absolutely central and occur extremely frequently; trying to understand gaelic without an understanding of verbal nouns would be a bit like trying to read Caesar without recognising the ablative absolute construction. I would take issue with the description of the copula too, but what's wrong is mostly that there's only a very brief outline of its uses and the distinction between it and the verb "bi" and that is inevitable in an article as short as this one. I dislike the use of the non citation form "tha" instead of "bi". That's like talking about "the verb is" instead of "the verb to be" in English when you intend to include all the forms was/were/am/are/be as well as "is", but I suppose it isn't really "wrong". On the declension of nouns the article says "'dative', so-termed in traditional grammars [better - 'post-prepositional' case]". If there was a single case which sollowed prepositions perhaps we should call it the post-prepositional case, but gaelic is not in that position: a good number of prepositions govern the genitive case, so we are much better off with the tradional "dative" than with the new-fangled "post-prepositional". When talking about declension it would probably be a good idea to mention that the nominative is now used in some cases where the genitive was previously used but the genitive is still alive and well in most of its traditional contexts and that the dative case is dying out rapidly except in a few frozen phrases. There is a complete absence of anything at all on adjectives (declension, relationship to nouns, comparison), adverbs, interrogatives, negations, particles, compound nouns, or clause structure; and an almost complete lack of mention of prepositions and pronouns. I guess someone will have to on the clean-up and completion of this article - and I hope someone other than me finds the time to do it before I decide it has been left too long! --Micheal--MichealT 20:17, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Contradict
In the first few lines of the overview section, it says there are five cases. But it then goes on to name only: nominative, genitive, vocative and dative. That's four. So which is it? - EstoyAquí(t • c • e) 00:23, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
