Hello everyone, I'm exploring my first and perhaps only tattoo and am looking for the Irish Gaelic translations of "Be, Have, Do" as an ever-present reminder of the inter-relationship between these life-verbs...

Thanks everyone!

Scott

Sorry to break this to you, but that’s not going to work very well in Irish.

For one thing, Irish doesn’t have a verb for ‘to have’.

On the other hand, they have two or three different ones for ‘to be’, depending on what kind of being is being described.

‘To do’ is the only one that’s fairly straightforward. That would just be déan (assuming you mean it as an imperative, not as an infinitive).

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Not a native speaker.

Always wait for at least three people to agree on a translation, especially if it’s for something permanent.

My translations are usually GU (Ulster Irish), unless CO (Standard Orthography) is requested.

Thanks for the response, so without a verb 'to have' how would one describe the condition of possession of something worthy of pursuit?

Not surprised on the multiple forms of 'to be' as this is somewhat common among languages. Can you provide examples of forms used for describing different states?

One kick to the particular inter-realtionship of these words is that there are various implications of using different forms and the overall relationship continues to work :-)

Irish does the same as most Slavic languages (and also Latin and Greek, though they have fully-fledged ‘have’ verbs, too): to say “I have X”, you say “X is for/to/by/at me”.


Basically, there are two verbs:

Bí is (for some reason) called the substantive verb. It’s mainly used to describe a state in which the subject is, or give an attribute to the subject: tá an fear mór = ‘the man is big’ (tá is the present tense of bí; the verb comes before the subject in Irish).

Is is called the copula. It’s used to classify or identify the subject with its predicate: is fear mór é = ‘he is a big man’.


Indeed—but one kick to the English language is that half the forms of verbs look the same. Not so in Irish: you kind of have to choose a form to go with.


Something Irish does like a lot is using nouns instead of verbs. English is quite verb-heavy, whereas Irish is more noun-heavy. The infinitive, for example, doesn’t really exist at all in Irish—instead, a verbal noun is used. That verbal noun means something quite close to the infinitive, but it is unmistakeably a noun (‘an instance of doing X’ or ‘the concept of doing X’). It often sounds better in these ‘string-of-verbs’ axioms to simply use a string of verbal nouns in Irish.

This also reduces the options a bit, because the copula is doesn’t have a verbal noun, so you have to go with bí (whose verbal noun is bheith). The verbal noun of déan is déanamh, though perhaps gníomh (an abstract noun which is—believe it or not—derived from the same root as déan) would be a better choice here; it means something more like ‘action’, i.e., a more ‘active’ doing, rather than just any doing … if that makes sense.

The construction for ownership, unfortunately, isn’t helped much here, because there’s no verbal noun for that, either.

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Not a native speaker.

Always wait for at least three people to agree on a translation, especially if it’s for something permanent.

My translations are usually GU (Ulster Irish), unless CO (Standard Orthography) is requested.

Everything kk said is of course correct, but if all you really want is something catchy which approximates what you were looking for, you could possibly use the following, which is just a string of verbal noun forms (each an approximation of a verbal infinitive in Irish, as kk explained), using the same verbal noun in each (plus an extra verbal noun at the end), with a sort of build up in the rhythm and some alliteration built in:

Bheith, bheith agat, bheith ag déanamh
to be ["being"], to have ["being at you"], to do ["being at doing"]

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

That’s rather clever, but I don’t think it works too well, unfortunately.

I wouldn’t understand what bheith agat, devoid of context, was supposed to mean. If I saw bheith, bheith agat, bheith ag déanamh on a tattoo, my first thought would be, “Oh dear … poor sod. He should have gone to IGTF/ILF instead of relying on Google Translate”, ’cause it wouldn’t make sense to me. I’d simply understand it as “to be, to be at you, to be doing” … I would certainly never suss that it was meant to say “be, have, do”.

_________________
Not a native speaker.

Always wait for at least three people to agree on a translation, especially if it’s for something permanent.

My translations are usually GU (Ulster Irish), unless CO (Standard Orthography) is requested.