Hi

Can I ask is it okay to say 'go raibh maith agat mhúinteoir or do does it have to be 'a mhúinteoir'? Are both correct?

Aaron

"Go raibh maith agat, a mhúinteoir"

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

Thanks for that, Is it still okay to say 'Go raibh maith agat mhúinteoir '? The reason I ask is I printed quite a few cards that have that text on them. I see the website below also has the same text.

https://cuando.ie/thank-you-message-for-teacher/

It's not grammatically correct, which is ironic since the cards are presumably designed to be given to a teacher who would know that. People sometimes create Irish "translations" of things by just taking words from an Irish dictionary without understanding Irish grammar or syntax. It's odd, though: the noun múinteoir has been put correctly into the vocative case by the lenition of the initial "m", but then the vocative particle "a" was left out.

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

The particle a often disappears in speech. See eg. in corkirish blog which states “The important thing is the lenition, not the particle itself, which is often only theoretically there” (because it’s often inaudible in fluent speech).

So might be it’s written by somebody using an eye dialect spelling – spelling in a non-standard way to draw more attention to actual pronunciation. But it’s weird to see something like that in learning-related…

You’d rather see that in potery, insongs lyrics, and most often after vowels, the vocative particle sometimes indicated by an apostrophe, eg. in Órú Mháire Bhruinneall, bhláth na Finne or ’Mháire Bhruinneall, ’bhláth na Finne (but also a Mháire Bhruinneall, a bhláth na Finne); or in Go mbristear do chosa, ’bhean Pháidín (more often as Go mbristear do chosa, a bhean Pháidín); or Téir abhaile riú, Mhéaraí/Mhary/Mháire.

Similarly some people seem to write things like bhfuil ’s ag éinne…? instead of an bhfuil a fhios ag éinne…? without the interrogative an but with eclipsis.

/ə/ (an, a) is left out at the very beginning of an utterance.
Inside an utterance it is omitted after vowels.

But following a consonant (here after agat) I'd pronounce it.