"A bheil sibh a' fuireach ann am *enter location here*?

[ScotiaBalach]

I've started the Beag Air Bheag course again (probably the fifth time) and this time I've actually stuck to it past the first two units!

But now I have a question:
in unit 3, it provides a way to ask "Do you live in *enter place here*?" by saying "A bheil sibh a' fuireach ann am *enter place here*?". My question is, what do all of the individual words mean? I mean, II know some of them like "sibh" and I think "am" (definitive article?)... but I find that sentences make more sense to me when I can dissect them and know what each individual word means and how the sentence has affected the way that word is presented (if that makes any sense...)

Thanks!

P.S. Please tell me if this is posted in the wrong forum!

[GunChleoc]

a - question
bheil - to be + present tense
sibh - you (plural or formal)
a'/ag - at
fuireach - living
ann am/ann an - in (before nouns)

[ScotiaBalach]

Thanks!

[akerbeltz]

It wobbles around a bit but when analysing a Gaelic sentence, this is the order in which you get stuff usually (explanations below and ignoring really complex phrases with subclauses and stuff):

(preverbial particles) | verb | subject | predicate

the predicate can be a wide variety of things, often

object | place | time
ag-phrase | place | time

preverbial particles are optional (hence the brackets) in the sense they don't always occur. They include interrogatives (an/am/a/nach/cò/càit/cuin/carson..), negations (chan, cha), depending on the phrase you may also get relative particles (a) or past tense markers (do/d').

If your brain works that way, it will help you exclude what cannot be in a certain place. For example, if faced with Chan aoireadh tu mo shinnsireachd simply by identifying tu as "you", you can make an educated guess that immediately before the subject we should have a verb (aoireadh) and that before that, we should only expect a preverbial particle. That means that although chan could (standing alone) be the past tense of can "say" it would be highly unusual to find this in this position.

That means that even without getting all of it, even with basic Gaelic you can get "not (some action) you my (something)". Very useful when trying to talk to someone when you don't have the time to check a dictionary.

Try fitting your sentence into the pattern and see what you get?