Thank you, really. I appreciate it a lot.



Yes, the website mentioned that I had not posted enough to send or receive PMs... hopefully that will soon be remedied.

Yes, at first glance, dheamhan works completely like copular ní in cleft sentences (e.g. Ní ina codladh atá sí). So, Dheamhan ina codladh atá sí should be permissive, too.
But there is something more in it.
Most papers focussed on a quantifyer role of dheamhan (and diabhal). I don’t know if I have really understood that (actually I ignored this aspect while reading). But I’d guess dheamhan is more like German "kein" rather than German "nicht" (= ní).
A verbatim translation like "Kein in ihrem Schlafen, das ist sie" makes no sense. A quantifyer must quantify something (even if the quantity is zero).

The fact that you can use dheamhan with an indirect relative clause supports this. (e.g., b'fhéidir, Dheamhan a raibh sí ina codladh.)
Dheamhan is not simply a negator. It has its own (quantifying) (pro)nominal role. So it can be an antecedent by itself. A rather verbatim translation is perhaps "Not so much she was in her sleep" or "Keinesfalls schlief sie."

I'm thinking this kind of mirrors the English syntax after "hardly" and "scarcely", where there is inversion, e.g. "scarcely was she asleep, when the fireworks started and woke her up".

I do believe that dheamhan is the Irish counterpart of Germanic Negative Inversion (except Irish is VSO and no inversion takes place in the language anyway). But for the rest it really looks like NI. Hardly/scarcely/barely (and only as well) are sort of negative, too, so they too trigger negative inversion. It makes a lot of sense.

Ó Siadhail (1980) does note that dheamhan seems to have a sort of quantificational flavour, which is also visible in the possible presence of a gap in the lower clause:

(i) Dheamhan a bhfaca mé __ de mhadraí.

But I'm not too convinced by this, as it could just be that dheamhan is added to a headless relative clause, which is quantificational on its own:

(ii) Chaith mé a raibh d'airgead agam. ---> Dheamhan a raibh d'airgead agam.

I would tend to see dheamhan as a negator, not as a quantifier. As Labhrás very correctly noted, one cannot say *Kein in Berlin wohne ich. But negation cannot stand on its own regardless of whether it is quantifying or not: *Nicht habe ich Hans gesehen is also ungrammatical; yet one gets dheamhan a bhfaca mé Seán. I think that dheamhan contributes negation, and the quantificational component is covert. This seems to be the case also for another reason: when you realise a short answer based on standalone dheamhan you need to add a dummy pronoun, because in that case you have no structure below dheamhan, and you cannot rely on covert quantification:

(iii) A: An bhfuil tú sona?
B: Dheamhan é (cf. Dheamhan a bhfuil mé sona)

Above, you mention surface structure of sentences. I would like to know more about Transformational Grammar for Irish. It seems I saw a book or two about it. Deep structure may explain a few things but as language goes, even for English it can be a bit disconcerting.

Hi, if you are interested in Irish syntax from the perspective of generative linguistics here you have a couple of articles/book chapters published by Jim McCloskey of UCSC. He does a great job of presenting the workings of Irish clausal syntax in a straightforward way. Below I post two links to preprints from his personal website (the first paper is more up to date):

https://people.ucsc.edu/~mcclosk/PDF/vso-2017.pdf

https://people.ucsc.edu/~mcclosk/PDF/shape.pdf

Nioclás, I'll read that.
I don't think syntax is taught to L2 learners in Ireland.
I wrote an article 9 years ago about poor Irish in An Hobaid (https://corkirish.wordpress.com/2014/03 ... -an-hobad/). I focused on this: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit". You cannot translate this in Irish as Williams did as "I bpoll sa talamh a bhí cónaí ar hobad". A hobbit is an indefinite noun and need to be stated first. You need something like "Do bhí hobbit ann, agus i bpoll sa talamh ’ bhí cónaí air".

Peadar Ua Laoghaire wrote the following in Irish Prose Composition (1902):
That even professors of Irish can make basic mistakes in Irish syntax is dispiriting. I think theories of generative grammar have a place in academic discussion, but even more vital is a handbook on syntax for learners.

I agree that Irish needs good prescriptive grammars and competent teachers, and that with a population of several million L2 learners who usually speak English in everyday life the danger of speaking fake Irish is very high, even for well-intentioned learners/teachers. The same happened with Hebrew: it's a wonder Hebrew was revived, but sometimes it really looks like a Slavic or Germanic language vested in Semitic lexicon.

That said, since generative grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive, it is indeed limited to academic discussion. It certainly cannot have a role in language teaching or learning: Chomsky, too, was very critical of the idea of teaching languages using generative models, and as far as I know it is not a common practice to incorporate GG into the formal teaching of any language. What can be a good way of describing how a language works can be a terrible way of teaching it. But in fact the two papers I linked are interested in what Irish can tell us about language as a faculty, rather than in the Irish language per se.

Jim is a formal linguist (specifically a syntactician), he does not teach the language, but I can guarantee you will never get "bad Irish" from him: he works on reliable data, double checks with native speakers, and does not present dubious material as fact (of course, one may not agree with the judgements of his consultants, but that is another matter). He has a deep knowledge of the language, and I think he did a great service to the language by putting it on the radar of the linguistic community. Also, Irish and Scottish Gaelic are pretty weird typologically, especially in comparison to other Indo-European languages, so they tend to get some attention for that reason.

Thanks a bunch. It will be interesting to study this. I always loved parsing sentences and doing TG problems at university but that's been ages ago.

Old subject, but as I was scrolling through the Doegen recordings I came upon this.
https://doegen.ie/LA_1219d1
Notice "Deamhan codladh air." So, it was used in Ulster Irish, this recording is from Louth.

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I recommend to learn Irish pronunciation on doegen.ie
Scottish Gaelic pronunciation on tobarandualchais.co.uk