Verbal nouns in Manx

[darth_blade]

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

Comments

[doe_witch]

I cannot help you, but mad props for working on a Goidelic language. I'd like to be a Celtic specialist one day but that branch beats the shit out of me!

[darth_blade]

Thanks!
So far it's beating the shit out of me as well, although it's only my third study session.

[marnanel]

Vague uninformed stab in the dark: it's not that ee is a lenited form of gee, is it? Do other words whose nominal form begins with a G drop the G for the verbal form?

[darth_blade]

Yes, I had a similar idea - that verbs starting with a vowel get a consonant in their noun form. However, this doesn't seem to happen to any other verbs with an initial vowel. I might be dealing with an irregular verb here, though...

[muckefuck]

Really? That's not what I've read elsewhere. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the analytic present is formed with the present tense of "to be", the preposition ag (or, in some circumstances, do), and the verbal noun. For instance: Irish: Táim (or Tá mé) ag ithe, Scottish Gaelic: Tha mi ag ithe. "I'm eating."

In speech, however, the vowels are run together, so Tá mé ag ithe ends up sounding like taw may gee. Now compare Manx ta mee gee. I really think the prefixed g is simply all that's left of the earlier pronoun. What vowel-initial verbal nouns did you find that don't take it?

[muckefuck]

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.

[darth_blade]

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.

[muckefuck]

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.

[darth_blade]

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 :)

[aerlinnel]

♥ this community :-)

[edricson]

According to Jennifer Kewley Draskau's Practical Manx (which I cannot recommend heartily enough), there is no single rule (as is, after all, generally the case in Goidelic). Here follows a list of the commonest suffixes:

ey: bwoalley "strike", dooney "shut", follaghey "hide"
agh: etlagh "fly"
tyn: bentyn "touch"
al: credjal "believe"
t: freggyrt "answer"
dyn: gialdyn "promise"
yn: jeeaghyn "look"
eil: leedeil "lead"
ys: togherys "wind"
oo: shassoo "stand"
iu: toilliu "deserve"
lym: çhaglym "meet, gather"
çhyn: toillçhyn "deserve"
Identical to stem (i. e. imperative singular in most cases): creck "sell", soie "sit".

Adding -ey can also cause depalatalization of the final consonant, with concomitant vowel changes (dooney is an example, since the stem is dooin).

It seems to me that verbs with the stem ending in -ee strongly tend to have verbal nouns with some variation of agh, but the variants are many (agh, aght, aghtyn); cf. the second conjugation of Irish which has the same phenomenon (ceannaigh, ceannaímGenerally verbal nouns are

[edricson]

(ceannaigh is of course the imperative; the verbal noun is ceannach)

[darth_blade]

Oh, I must've missed that comment.
Thank you! This is extremely helpful!

God, I wish I could order "Practical Manx", but for some reason Amazon won't accept my card anymore.

[edricson]

Maybe you could try the publisher