Quote:
"An fearr leat an Ghaeilge?"
It would be "An fearr leat Gaeilge?", but the meaning would be "Do you prefer Irish?"
Quote:
"Gaeilge, b'fhéidir?"
That would work, but it would mean simply "Irish, perhaps?"
Quote:
On the butterfly topic: This really got me thinking/considering a change of nuance. Vocative, huh? Okay, that rather fills me with terror.
Case 1: So if I understand correctly, for the father to be saying to his adult daughter (forever his little girl), as if she had just walked up to him, he would say,
"A fhéileacáin." (which would be saying literally "my butterfly")? As in, "And what are you doing today, my butterfly?"
Case 2: Alternately, and I think I now lean toward this interpretation: if instead her actual nickname is "Butterfly" (like "Sunshine" or "Cupcake" etc...), how would that change the statement?
It would be "
A fhéileacáin" in both cases ("O [my] butterfly/beauty"), because he would be addressing his daughter in each case. The vocative case is present in a number of languages, but has almost disappeared in English. We still have a remnant of it in expressions like "O God", used when speaking to God. Actually, it is also what one is saying in situations such as when one says "Oh, John, will you do this for me", but we have mostly lost sight of the original grammatical structure of such expressions, and have (through ignorance) converted it to the interjection "Oh", rather than the original "O".
By contrast, if the speaker were discussing his daughter with someone else, he would refer to her as "
m' fhéileacán" ("my butterfly"). The added "h" is still there, because the same sound change occurs as with the vocative in a number of other situations, such as when using the possessive pronoun "
mo" ("my").