Fòram na Gàidhlig

I've always been a bit suspect about the idea of "air a bhith" as an equivalent to "have been", as most European languages just use the present tense for this -- most languages would literally just say "I am here since three years" or "I study Gaelic since 5 years".

So I was reading the news, right, and I came across this:
""Tha sinn a' feitheamh freagairt o luchd-taic Roseanna Choinneagain, agus tha sinn còrr is sia seachdainnean co-dhiù a' feitheamh freagairt air ceistean a chuir sinn thuca mu dheidhinn na fianais saidheansail a tha iad air a chur a-mach," thuirt Cathraiche na buidhne-iomairt, Aonghas MacLeòid."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/alba/naid ... _sac.shtml

No "air a bhith" here.

So should "I have been" (for a state that continues up to and including the present time) really just be present tense in Gaelic?

The above is slightly suspect as feitheamh normally requires ri - I wouldn't necessarily take BBC Alba articles as a model (many are translations) but that aside, it's more complicated that yes or no.

air a bhith is a perfectly acceptable construction in Gaelic, the main question should be when to use it, not if. As I see it, the main problem is that in normal spoken discourse between native speakers, 4 tenses and moods normally do the trick (present, past, future, conditional). The concept of the pluperfect is normally inferred from the context. For example, tha mi air a bhith ag ionnsachadh Xhosa fad bliadhna would be seen as a bit overblown in spoken since broadly the same meaning could equally be conveyed by thòisich mi air Xhosa ionnsachadh bliadhna air ais or tha mi ag ionnsachadh Xhosa le bliadhna a-nis. In writing, it's more common, especially if it's not a colloquial piece and you wanting to be specific about what happened when.

No hard and fast rule, think of it as a sliding scale - the more pints, the fewer air a bhith's you should use.

Tha mi air a bhith a' leughadh Martain Dòmhnallach sa Phress and Journal

'Chuir mi eolas air DR ann an sgoil Phortruigh ann an 1956. Cha b’e nach robh an dithis againn air a bhith anns an aon sgoil son tri bliadhna comhla na bu traithe ach cha robh cus cothrom ann air eolas a chur air a cheile is sinn a’ ruith eadar chlasaichean. Uill, mise caran beagan slaodach is mo charaid moran na bu luaithe na mi.'

Gheibhear tuilleadh an seo:
http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1644647

Gràisg,
That's a far more complicated timeline, though, isn't it?

P&J wrote:Cha b’e nach robh an dithis againn air a bhith anns an aon sgoil son tri bliadhna comhla na bu traithe

That "na bu traithe" kind of messes with the continuity a bit, because it implies "before the event".

Consider:
We had been at the same school for three years when we met.
We had been at the same school for three years before we met.

The first is a period of time up to and including meeting, but the second is a time up to the moment before meeting. Most languages would be happy to use a past perfect for the second, as it doesn't include the reference time (the moment of "nach robh"), but many would avoid using it for the first, as it does include the reference time.

"air a bhith" always sounded too clumsy and inefficient to be real language...

Akerbeltz wrote:In writing, it's more common, especially if it's not a colloquial piece

And my big problem with that is that writing is a conscious thing, and most people Gaels learn to do it through English, so I don't trust writing.. and there's no spoken corpus yet. From the consistent model across Europe, I see no reason to relegate a natural form like "tha mi ag ionnsachadh Xhosa le bliadhna a-nis" to "colloquialism". If I was writing a syllabus, I would be far happier teaching that than "air a bhith".

Incidentally, why does this construction use "le" rather than "bho chionn" or "fad"?

And what would the best way of forming the opposite? Would this be "tha mi gun Xhosa a dh'ionnsachadh" or something along those lines?

That "na bu traithe" kind of messes with the continuity a bit, because it implies "before the event".

Yesno, you're coming at this from English :b The simple rule inherited from Old Irish is/was that verbs must agree in tense and mood with the tense/mood of the main clause verb. So the na bu tràithe is a simple result of cha b' e - some of the finer nuances of English tense just don't transfer to Gaelic. It happens, cf a dog of the boy vs the dog of the boy vs cù a' bhalaich.

And my big problem with that is that writing is a conscious thing, and most people Gaels learn to do it through English, so I don't trust writing.. and there's no spoken corpus yet.

No need to be THAT distrustful of Gaelic writing by native speakers. After all, written language is by its nature never the equivalant of the spoken language, Gaelic, English or Cantonese. And I wasn't suggesting that colloquial language is bad. It's just different.

akerbeltz wrote:some of the finer nuances of English tense just don't transfer to Gaelic. It happens, cf a dog of the boy vs the dog of the boy.

...except that neither of these is genuine English. There's the boy's dog and one of the boy's dogs and that's your lot.

I couldn't think of a better one but you *can* make that distinction in English, but not in Gaelic. I just couldn't be bothered trying to find a better English example.

Not often though, an usually with very different meanings indeed.

Have a taste of the soup vs I don't like the taste of the soup (Different senses of taste -- sample vs flavour)

A history of the world vs The history of the world (history as a particular document recounting past events vs history as the set of all past events)

Where the sense of the noun doesn't change, merely the definiteness, English will resort to "one of +definite plural of the...". There is a subtlety here, but it's not the one you mentioned, and it actually mirrors Gaelic perfectly well, because to be explicitly indefinite in English or Gaelic requires implying unambiguously that there is more than one. If you want to obscure the number (or if you don't know the actual number), then you have to use a definite form.

eg His brother. This is structurally definite, but it is conceivable that he has more than one brother, which means it is not actually that definite. If I know he has more than one, I can say one of his brothers, but I cannot say this unless I'm pretty sure he has more than one. While I can imply that he has more than one brother, I cannot do the same to indicate that he only has one -- this needs stated explicitly.

I don't mean to go on, but so many Gaelic grammars and textbooks talk about this nonsensical structure and it only serves to confuse learners. And that's not a good thing.

Can you on the one hand dismiss something on the basis that we don't have a corpus and then make a judgement that it's nonsense (in spite of the lack of a corpus)? Many a grammar book that explains the use of air a bhith is not written by what I'd consider linguistic novices (such as SGI3M) AND the use of air a bhith in printed sources goes back a long time so while we might be unsure as to the right register and context in which to use it, we can't just dismiss it out of hand as a calque. Even if it was a calque, it's here to stay...

Addendum:
Searching through the mini-corpus at Lancashire Uni (http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/biml/bimls3corpus.htm) we have 4 instances of air a bhith in a corpus of spoken Gaelic, one in a speech, 2 in a sermon and one in a talk. Way, José

Chan eil ach aon rud a theid "overuse" san deasbad seo - agus sin Beurla.

Am bi na Sasannaich ag radh "would have had to have done" tron am? Bithidh. De cho sliobach sin?

Sa Chuimris, "Rydw i wedi bod yn yfed" - sin ceart (a roinn gramair) - "Tha mi air a bhith ag ol".

Seonaidh wrote:Chan eil ach aon rud a theid "overuse" san deasbad seo - agus sin Beurla.

Give it a rest.

Most of us have enough trouble discussing the finer points of grammar study in any language -- I'm not going to spend days researching how to have this conversation. For one thing, to be able to have the conversation, I'd have to have worked out enough about the language to have answered my own questions. But how am I going to learn without being able to ask the questions?

If you don't want to read English, feel free to skip past all posts written in it. In fact, probably best if you ignore all threads I start because they're bound to upset your Geordie-Welsh sensibilities. I won't take offence.

Besides, the split between Welsh and Gaelic occurred several thousand years ago, and the Brythonic family has spent the last 1500 years in close proximity with English. It's extremely difficult to say which shared features occur independently, which are Anglo-Saxon borrowings into Welsh and which are Brythonic borrowings into English.

The simple existence of something in Welsh isn't proof of "Celticness".

*a' cur a h-ad maoir oirre*

Feuchaibh gum bi sibh modhail is leanaibh leis a chuspair ann an cànan a thogras sibh

*a' cur a h-ad maoir dhith*

akerbeltz wrote: air a bhith is a perfectly acceptable construction in Gaelic, the main question should be when to use it, not if. As I see it, the main problem is that in normal spoken discourse between native speakers, 4 tenses and moods normally do the trick (present, past, future, conditional). The concept of the pluperfect is normally inferred from the context. For example, tha mi air a bhith ag ionnsachadh Xhosa fad bliadhna would be seen as a bit overblown in spoken since broadly the same meaning could equally be conveyed by thòisich mi air Xhosa ionnsachadh bliadhna air ais or tha mi ag ionnsachadh Xhosa le bliadhna a-nis. In writing, it's more common, especially if it's not a colloquial piece and you wanting to be specific about what happened when.

No hard and fast rule, think of it as a sliding scale - the more pints, the fewer air a bhith's you should use.

As a learner, I've noticed many fluent speakers don't to use pluperfect in most cases where, in English, a person would have used it. I just haven't come across the pluperfect much at all in writing or speech.

As an English speakers whose first and second foreign languages were German and French, I want to be more precise with verb tenses--in a Germanic/Romantic kind of way--than what seems appropriate for Gaelic. It has started to feel like a hypercorrection of sorts when I use the pluperfect in speech, and I often don't feel the other person is really following what I say. I think I just need to gain confidence in using the main verb tenses when my habit is to use the pluperfect in many cases. But being aware of this has made me more attentive to the nuances Gaelic speakers use to express the verbal concepts that we'd use pluperfect to express in English.

Ah, nostalgia. I remember this thread.
Incidentally, Akerbeltz made a slight slip-up in terminology.

"Tha mi air a bhith a' deanamh rudeigin" isn't pluperfect, it's present perfect continuous -- tha mi air a bhith = present perfect, a' deanamh = continuous.

Pluperfect (more that perfect, "plu" from the same root as "plus" (as in 1+1)) is also known as the past perfect -- Bha mi air deanamh rudeigin.

So you can also get "pluperfect continuous", aka "past perfect continuous": bha mi air a bhith a' deanamh rudeigin.

Akerbeltz knows the difference, and we all say things we didn't intend to. I wanted to make sure this was corrected before the wrong definition spread, cos it would make reading grammar books slightly confusing.