Relative clauses in Gaelic languages
This page compares relative clause constructions present in the Gaelic languages. Irish examples will be provided in green, Scottish Gaelic in light blue and Manx in red, Classical Gaelic examples in black. Beside that all examples will be also written in a normalized spelling based on Dinneen’s dictionary of Irish and modern editions of Classical Gaelic texts.
The discussion will be divided into sections focusing on different types of relative clause antecedent, ie. what the relation of the thing the relative clause describes is to the relative clause. For example in English:
- I saw the pigeon that sat on a tree the phrase the pigeon is the subject of the relative clause (it’s the pigeon that was sitting on a tree),
- I saw the pigeon whose nest is in the tree the relation is possessive (sometimes called genitive) because the pigeon appears as the owner of something mentioned in the clause (it’s the pigeon’s nest in the tree),
- you met the man to whom I was talking the relation is prepositional (the talking happened to the man).
Subject antecedent
When the antecedent of a clause is its grammatical subject, in Classical Gaelic the verb was lenited and for regular verbs in the 3rd person sg. present and future tenses the special relative form was used:
- an fear mholas an leabhar ‘the man who praises the book’,
often when the clause itself identified the referrent of the noun, the definite article was not used:
- ad-chiú mhnáoi mharbhas bhoin ‘I see the woman who kills a cow’.
If the verb was understood to be a compound verb with a preverb do- (or short t- before verbal roots beginning with a vowel), ad-, fo-, etc. only the verbal root was lenited:
- an triar táinig ‘the three (people) who came’,
- fear do-bheir an réad damh ‘the man who gives the thing to me’.
