Vitaee wrote:
I get what you're saying about "THE Irish language" vs "IN Irish". But in my original question, I was imagining I just said something in Irish, and somebody asked me "What language was that?" In that scenario, I didn't speak the whole Irish language, so wouldn't it be more like Lughaidh implied later that I just spoke PART of the Irish language thus making it an indefinite "Gaeilge" versus a definite "an Ghaeilge" and all the grammatical rules that implies?
I agree now with Lughaidh: no article here.
Vitaee wrote:
Bríd Mhór wrote:
With spoken Irish, we just say: Sin Gaeilge!
I take it that's the informal everyday spoken Irish vs the stricter written standard version. I also assume your answer means "That IS Irish", but how would you say "That WAS Irish" in the same format?
I don't think these versions are less formal, at least in present tense.
It depends more on circumstances than on formality.
Sin ... is a presenting formula ("Look there, that is ..."), much like French
voilà or Latin
ecce In fact even etymologically it is the same: originally
ag sin ("look that", "ag" earlier "acc" related to "feic", it is not the preposition) in Classical Irish.
Is ... é sin is more determing (that thing, not this or any other thing, is ...)
A bit different is "
b'in" in past tense.
Because such sentences weren't copula sentences originally, and forms like "in" or "eo" are hard to justify etymologically, Standard Irish disallowed all forms with a visible copula, so that only "ba ... é sin" should be used in past tense. (so in GGBC)
But many dialects have used such forms for at least 200 years and recent revisions of Standard Irish accept them, too.
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