Hi all!

I've been asked by my Aunt to suggest a line or phrase which would be appropriate to inscribe on a park-bench to commemorate my grandparents in their home village. Both of them would have had very good Irish, though they weren't native speakers. My grandmother won a fáinne for her ability with the language during her school days, which I believe was quite an accomplishment at the time, and I'm told she used be the only one in her household who could converse with an aunt of hers who only spoke Irish.

I suggested the usual Ar dheis Dé... at first, but I feel it's a bit flat or uninspired. Maybe it's because it's so widely used on gravestones, but I feel it doesn't seem completely appropriate on something commemorating their life to draw attention to the fact that they died (albeit, some time ago). So, I've been looking through some books of poetry and seanfhocail to see if I can find anything a bit more nuanced, but I haven't been having too much luck.

Can anybody offer a suggestion of something a bit more celebratory, maybe referring to fond memories, for example? I've seen some great idiomatic translations offered on this forum, and I'd be really thankful for that sort of insight now.

Thanks in advance,
Adrian.


Edit:

At the moment I'm thinking of using the following:

1. Beidh Síad i gCuimhne na hÁite, followed by their names

2. Clann Mhic Sleimhne (just the family name)

If anyone could comment on these that would be great too. I'm really unsure of the genitive construction of the second one. I know the base form of the name is Mac Sleimhne, but I'm not sure how to form the genitive of it.

How about . . .?

In loving memory of . . .

I ndilchuimhne ar . . .

Thanks for the suggestion, Tim. I think it's quite similar to ar dheis dé in that it seems like something that might be said about someone who recently passed away.

I think what I'm actually going to go with is a take on Tomás Ó Criomhthain. The full quote from An tOileánach:

...do thugas iarracht ar mheon na ndaoine do bhí im thimpeall do chur síos chuin go mbeadh a dtuairisc 'ár ndiadh, mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann.

I think I'll adapt it to:

Na daoine do bhí inár dtimpeall ... ná beidh a leithéidé arís ann.

If anyone could confirm this it'd be great. I'm especially unsure of the use of ná beidh instead of ní bheidh.

leithéidí

I’d think ní bheidh is better:

Na daoine do bhí inár dtimpeall, ní bheidh a leithéidí arís ann.

Ooops. Thanks for catching this. I had meant to write leithéidí.



Thanks for the insight here. Is ná beidh a dialectal variant?

It is a Munster variant of Standard nach mbeidh, in all its meanings.

But this isn’t necessary here (Ó Criomhthain uses mar ná beidh = because there won’t be)

By the way, would mar ní bheidh a leithéidí arís ann also be possible in this meaning? I see that FGB gives both mar, mar go for ‘because’ (the explanation (e) of the 2. definition), so both mar atáim… and mar go bhfuillim… are possible for ‘because I am…’, but it only gives mar nach raibh an t-ádh linn ‘because we were not in luck’ as a negative example – I’m curious if leaving nach/ná in the negative is also possible.

EDIT: and also what about the copula? FGB gives only mar gurb é is údar leis, what about mar ba… and mar is (eg. could ‘because I can’ be expressed by both mar gur féidir liom and mar is féidir liom)?

mar táim (mar atáim, in Modern Irish, means rather "like I am")


Yes, of course, mar ní is possible.

Examples:
Do bhí a thuairim fíor, mar ní raibh muc ná banbh insa Bhlascaod ó shin. (Ó Criomhthain, An tOileánach)
"Mar ní bhfuaireas í," arsa Seán. (P. Ua Laoghaire, Mo Scéal Féin)

But except inside a "go phrase", so prob. not in Ó Criomhthain’s sentence in Ada’s post.
Here we have ... chuin go mbeadh ... mar ná ....

That clarifies a lot. Thanks for the explanation.

So, did Ó Criomhthain use ná beidh because it's a more natural way to follow mar, or are nach mbeidh and ní bheidh more or less interchangeable after mar? If there's a syntactic difference here, what is it?

In a main sentence both are interchangeable. I’d think mar ní bheidh is more common.

But see my last post.
I wrote:



do thugas iarracht ar ... chuin go mbeadh a dtuairisc ’ár ndiadh, mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann

Here, mar ná is a subordinate clause of the chuin go clause.
Why should their tuairisc be ’ár ndiaidh? Because their leithéidí won't be arís ann.

If he would write mar ní bheidh here, this subordination would be blurred and the clause would be subordinate only to the matrix sentence itself: do thugas iarracht ...
Why did he give iarracht? Because their leithéidí won't be arís ann.