Verbal nouns in Manx

Dec 20, 2008 03:26

Does anybody happen to know the rule for forming verbal nouns in Manx? In that language, several verb tenses are formed by preposing an auxiliary verb to verbal noun, but I've had no luck looking for rules on how to form it. For example, the noun form of the verb ee "to eat" is gee, while the verb tilgey "to throw" apparently doesn't undergo any ( Read more... )

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muckefuck December 20 2008, 02:17:25 UTC
I don't know Manx, but I know Irish, and in Irish there is no single rule that works in all cases. The single most common ending is probably -(e)adh, but -(e)áil and -(i)ú are very common as well. The Irish cognates for ee and tilgey would, respectively, ithe (stem + e) and teilg (no change).

You have to keep in mind that even though the Celtic verbal noun is often used the way a gerund or infinitive would be in English, it's not actually a verbal inflection. It's a derived form and these are more variable, as you can see from comparable English examples like see -> sight, lose -> loss, live -> life, and so forth.

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darth_blade December 20 2008, 02:19:23 UTC
A-ha! I've found a language you don't know! :P

>>it's not actually a verbal inflection. It's a derived form and these are more variable

Now that's... discouraging.

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muckefuck December 20 2008, 02:39:15 UTC
On the plus side, the Manx verbal system is almost entirely analytic. For the verb coayl, Jenner lists only seven distinct forms: coayl, chaill (past tense), er-choayl (perfect), caillee (future), caill (singular imperative), caillijee (plural imperative), and caillit (past participle). The corresponding Irish verb caill has a least fifty inflected forms--more in some dialects. As Goidelic languages go, you really picked the cakewalk.

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darth_blade December 20 2008, 02:43:08 UTC
Now that's... encouraging. To say the least.
I sometimes mess up synthetic forms even in my native language and I completely and utterly failed to learn the Spanish tense system, effectively wasting two years in university. Inflection is definitely not my thing :)

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embryomystic December 20 2008, 12:40:23 UTC
I don't know Manx well either, but I would guess that in the case of tilgey, analogical levelling has occurred, adding the cognate of -(e)adh (which -ey certainly is, among other things) to the cognate of teilg.

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muckefuck December 20 2008, 17:03:31 UTC
Could be. Incidentally, my first source had it wrong: According to An Foclóir Beag and my print dictionary, the standard verbal noun of teilg is teilgean. (Not a word I use, incidientally; I would say caith.) I found plenty of Ghits for teilgeadh, however, which may represent the presence of analogical levelling in Modern Irish or be relics of earlier dialect variation.

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embryomystic December 21 2008, 17:58:33 UTC
Without the data in front of me, I'd be inclined to guess that it's analogical levelling, if only because -(e)adh is, in my head, pretty strongly associated with verbal nouns. There are other words that end like that, but if I were given a verb I'm not familiar with and asked to guess at the verbal noun, I'd probably add -(e)adh to the root. Dunno if native speakers are so inclined, but there are plenty of non-native Gaeilgeoirí contributing to the gestalt.

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