Scottish Gaelic grammar
Most cases of slenderisation can be explained historically as the palatalizing influence of a following front vowel (such as -⟨i⟩) in earlier stages of the language.
A very small group of nouns have declensional patterns that suggest mixed gender characteristics.
Foreign nouns that are fairly recent loans arguably fall into a third gender class (discussed by Black), if considered in terms of their declensional pattern.
Pluralisation, as in Irish Gaelic and Manx, can vary according to noun class, however on the whole depends on the final sound of the singular form.
The case system is now under tremendous pressure and speakers exhibit varying degrees of paradigm simplification.
[citation needed] Nouns in the dative case only occur after a preposition, and never, for example, as the indirect object of a verb.
Nouns in the vocative case are introduced by the particle a+L, which lenites a following consonant, and is elided (and usually not written) before a vowel.
A T-V distinction is found in the 2nd person, with the plural form sibh used also as a polite singular.
In the plural, a single form is used for both masculine and feminine genders, in all cases (although it may be lenited depending on the context).
[7] The feminine singular a derives from a form ending in final -⟨s⟩, whose only trace is now the prefixation of h- to a following vowel.
The actual realization of the capitalised forms in the paradigm above depends on the initial sound of the following word, as explained in the following table: Putting all of those variants together into one table: The forms of the definite article trace back to a Common Celtic stem *sindo-, sindā-.
[9] The following examples illustrate a number of nominal declension patterns, and show how the definite article combines with different kinds of nouns.
In the paradigm of the verb, the majority of verb-forms are not person-marked and independent pronouns are required as in English, Norwegian and other languages.
'Verbal nouns' play a crucial role in the verbal system, being used in periphrastic verbal constructions preceded by a preposition where they act as the sense verb, and a stative verb conveys tense, aspect and mood information, in a pattern that is familiar from other Indo-European languages.
Verbal nouns carry verbal semantic and syntactic force in such core verbal constructions as a result of their meaning content, as do other nouns found in such constructions, such as tha e na thost "he is quiet, he stays silent", literally "he is in his silence", which mirrors the stative usage found in tha e na shuidhe "he is sitting, he sits", literally "he is in his sitting".
The verbal noun covers many of the same notions as infinitives, gerunds and present participles in other Indo-European languages.
In a general sense, the verb system is similar to that found in Irish, the major difference being the loss of the simple present, this being replaced by the periphrastic forms noted above.
The number of copular verbs and their exact function in Gaelic is a topic of contention among researchers.
There is a certain amount of variation in sources, making it difficult to come to a definitive conclusion about certain aspects of copular verbs.
Scottish Gaelic, however, does not use stress and very rarely uses word order changes to create emphasis.
"[10]Bi: Historically called the “substantive” verb, tha (the present indicative independent 3rd person singular form of bi) can be used in constructions with adjectival complements, locative predicates, and in aspectually marked sentences (MacAulay, page 180).
"It is also possible to use tha to describe a noun or pronoun with a nominal complement by using an embedded pronoun (MacAulay, page 179): ThaisIainIannain.3SG.MASC.PN (in-his; for convenience)shaighdearsoldierTha Iain na shaighdearis Ian {in.3SG.MASC.PN (in-his; for convenience)} soldier"Ian is a soldier.
In Classical Gaelic, is incorporates the subject (3rd person singular), the noun or adjective that follows is in the nominative, and the second noun/pronoun is objective in case.
In the case of -⟨s⟩, this is from the original initial ⟨s⟩- of the definite article (Old Irish in, ind from Proto-Celtic *sindos, *sindā, etc.
Old Irish fond euch "under the horse", Scottish Gaelic fon each or fon an each, in Classical Gaelic fán eoch): Prepositions that mark the dative take the conjugated dative forms of the personal pronouns, thus *aig mi "at me" and *le iad "with them" are incorrect.
[6] Less formally, gam etc can undergo lenition – i.e. gham, ghad etc (sometimes erroneously spelled dham, dhad etc) and there are two n-less variants of nam and nad:
