If I am overdoing it on the questions, please feel free to ignore me. (It is a holiday here today, so I am doing a lot of work on Irish this afternoon.)

At the moment I am doing an exercise on Irish prepositions in which I am given pieces of various sentences that I then have to complete with various nouns off a list as appropriate (the nouns are things like trees, the basket, the boys, those people, the hospital, the school, etc.).

One Irish sentence begins "Tá leabhar nua ag..." and then I am supposed to match it up with the correct nouns off the list and eclipse as appropriate. I thought that sentence said roughly, "There is a new book at..." and so I was going to match it up with place nouns from the list (hospital, school, etc.)

But the answer key is completing the sentence only with people...as in "Tá leabhar nua ag an dochtúir," "Tá leabhar nua ag an gcailín," etc.

This leads me to believe the sentence may be a way of expressing ownership rather than location. Is it? As in, "The doctor has a new book," "The girl has a new book," etc. Or am I completely off on the meaning?

Thank you!

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Brand new Irish learner inclined to ask questions. Writer, Words & Worlds of New York, a website about language-learning. http://www.ellenjovin.com

No problem with the questions. Keep them coming. That's what we are here for.

Technically ag expresses possession. Ownership is expressed by le.

Contrast the following:

Tá an cóta agam. "I have the coat." literally "The coat is at me."
Tá an cóta orm. "I am wearing the coat." literally "The coat is on me."
Is liomsa an cóta. "The coat belongs to me." literally "The coat is with me."

You can also use ag for position:

Tá an fear ag an doras. "The man is at the door."

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

Should that be "Is liomsa an cóta" or can you use tá as well?

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Táim ag foghlaim fós. Fáilte roimh gach aon cheartúchán.

Thank you very much, Breandán.

Hm, this reminds me of something I learned in my Irish audio lessons from Pimsleur: "Tá Gaeilge agam." (I don't know whether I am writing that correctly; I heard it only, never saw it.) It was taught to me as the equivalent of "I speak Irish." It took me a while to remember it, because it didn't seem as though there was any speaking going on in the sentence at all! It was a surprising construction.

"Tuigim Gaeilge" was a lot more intuitive!

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Brand new Irish learner inclined to ask questions. Writer, Words & Worlds of New York, a website about language-learning. http://www.ellenjovin.com

In Pimsleur they say "Tá Gaelainn agam." Another beautiful/annoying thing about dialects is that they all call the language by different names. Gaelainn/Gaoluinn/Gaolainn is the Munster dialect word (there is no standard spelling since it's a non-standard word).

"Tuigim Gaelainn" strikes me as béarlachas (anglicisation) escpecially in the way the phrase is used in the Pimsleur course. It makes it obvious that the dialogue is a translation of an English script.

Pimsleur is probably the best course out there for learning pronunciation (espcially if you want Munster dialect), but not much good for learning grammar or native idiom.

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Táim ag foghlaim fós. Fáilte roimh gach aon cheartúchán.

Thank you, Mick. Well, there are only 10 Pimsleur lessons, alas, so I can't get very far with THAT no matter what!

From the same grammar exercise as before, I can't figure out the meaning of "Cuir i dtaisce é sa bhosca."

Put it in the box, perhaps?
Save it in the box?

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Brand new Irish learner inclined to ask questions. Writer, Words & Worlds of New York, a website about language-learning. http://www.ellenjovin.com

Okay, wait, I am just registering something, Mick. I was massively confused about how Pimsleur was getting that pronunciation off of the spelling Gaeilge. So from what you are saying, they WEREN'T, correct?

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Brand new Irish learner inclined to ask questions. Writer, Words & Worlds of New York, a website about language-learning. http://www.ellenjovin.com

You are right, Mick. Fixed above.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

The pronunciation is correct, but the word they are pronouncing is not Gaeilge. Pimsleur is in Munster Irish, and Munster people have a different name for the language.

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Táim ag foghlaim fós. Fáilte roimh gach aon cheartúchán.

Here's the home page of Cork Irish where there's a short discussion of what makes the difference between what is spoken in Munster and what is supposed to be the official standard Irish. (I might add that here in France, not so long ago children had to adapt to an official variety of French when they started at school - no Breton, Occitan, Corsican, Catalan, Basque etc (and sometimes not even local dialects) were permitted nor tolerated.)
http://corkirish.wordpress.com/why-cork-irish/