TRIGGER WARNING: CONTAINS PRONOUNS!
Yesterday, President of the United States of America, Joe Biden, addressed a joint sitting of the houses of Oireachtas in Dublin. Predictably he included an attempt at Irish in his speech to the obvious appreciation of those attending. I was a bit confused by the way what he said was reported in the Irish media, however, e.g.
My confusion was that I didn’t think he said tá mé seo abhaile as widely reported. For one thing, even I as a beginner could see that phrase means “I am this home”, which doesn’t make any sense (not to me, anyway). There are various possibilities for what Joe Biden did say. For what it’s worth I thought it was tá mé sa bhaile which, loosely, means “I am at home”. I note that the news media have generally changed their accounts (e.g. here) to reflect this, although other forms of words are possible. I’m not surprised that Biden struggled with the pronunciation – most of us beginners do, but I think the writers and editors of the newspapers above might at least have corrected his grammar.
The phrase illustrates a couple of interesting curiosities about the Irish language. Expressing the verb “to be” in Irish isn’t as straightforward as it is English. There are two grammatically distinct ways of doing this. The two Irish forms are bí, which is like the English verb “to be” and the so-called copula, is, which is sometimes called a defective verb. It’s admittedly a bit confusing that the copula looks like the third-person singular of the verb “to be” in English, but there you go.
Going back to bí, it is frequently referred to as tá (its present tense form as in the phrase above). It can be fully conjugated in all tenses and persons but it is highly irregular. Grammatically, bí is also just like any other verb, coming first in the sentence, followed by a subject (either a separate noun or pronoun or a suffix, depending on the tense and person, as shown in the conjugations), and then its predicate and any remaining adverbial information. Thus tá mé is “I am” with the pronoun mé. The accents (síneadh fada) mean that this is pronounced taw-may.
The copula, however, is not fully conjugated for different subjects, which are always expressed by separate nouns or pronouns, and it only has two forms for different tenses: is can be used for present or future meaning, and ba (with lenition) is used for past or conditional meanings.
Among the specific situations in which the copular is must be used instead of bí but the main one is to be followed by a noun. You can’t say “I am a Professor” using tá – it has to be Is Ollamh mé – but to say “I am old” it is Tá mé sean.
One final remark. If you’re scared of pronouns please look away now. There are over 120 different pronouns in the Irish language. There’s a special version of the pronoun mé written mise which has two uses that I am aware of. One is when the copular is used for identification – so “I am Peter” is Is mise Peadar – and the other is for emphasis, when it is roughly equivalent to “myself” in English.
P.S. The Irish word for “pedantry” is pedantraí…
In the Dark 