Yes and No in Irish

Einhard

I'm in the middle of doing up a lesson plan on the history of English, and have started on Hiberno-English. I had understood that one of the signal between HE and BrE was the use of "I am" and "I'm not" in the former in response to Yes or No questions, and that this was a product of Gaelic not having a directly translatable form of either of the latter. Then I got to thinking about "Sea" and "Nil" which i had always considered to be the Irish versions of "Yes" and "No". Yet wherever I look, I'm told that no such thing exists in the Irish laguage. The only soutions that springs to mind is that perhaps the latter two phrases are not diectly translatable as so, or that they are redent linguistic inventions. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

Thanks.

Dun

"Sea" is the copula, not yes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_syntax#Answering_questions_with_the_copula

Níl is the negative of tá, so again it means "is not", not no.

Einhard

From that article, the cupola is "Is". Would "Sea" be a contraction of "Is ea" then?

Doubt.It

I don't remember this too well from school, but I understood that, yes, these are comparatively recent inventions, and I was under the impression that they evolved (or were invented) to simplify voting.

It's the convention in Irish (and so in Hiberno-English) to answer a question with a sentence using the same verb. So in Irish a question meaning "Do you bring x?" would be answered with "I bring" or "I bring not".

In English a lot of questions are asked with auxiliary verbs - "are you", "do you", "can you", etc., and it is easy for the Irish-language convention to adapt to that and only sound mildly formal. "Will you be running in the race?" "I will". But in Irish verbs are single words, so the question is answered with "I will be running".

In a voting situation then, the form the answer took would depend on how the question was phrased, so the relative simplicity of the Yes-No convention may have seemed too attractive not to adopt.

The Irish equivalent is based on the copula, a kind of verb that expresses the identity of one thing with another. If I remember correctly, Sea is an abbreviation of Is ea, which is an emphatic form of Is é meaning "It is". Technically the negative of this would be Ní hea, "It is (emphatically) not", but by convention simply Níl - "Not" or "Is not" - is used instead. I'm not sure why, but it occurs to me that they're easier to tell apart when called out.

deirdremf

Doubt.It wrote: »

I don't remember this too well from school, but I understood that, yes, these are comparatively recent inventions, and I was under the impression that they evolved (or were invented) to simplify voting.

....
The Irish equivalent is based on the copula, a kind of verb that expresses the identity of one thing with another. If I remember correctly, Sea is an abbreviation of Is ea, which is an emphatic form of Is é meaning "It is". Technically the negative of this would be Ní hea, "It is (emphatically) not", but by convention simply Níl - "Not" or "Is not" - is used instead. I'm not sure why, but it occurs to me that they're easier to tell apart when called out.

I'm not sure you've got it entirely right there, particularly about sea, which you correctly say is a contraction of is ea - but I don't think it has anything to do with voting.
In fact if you look at posters around voting time, or the voting paper itself, you will see that the forms used there are tá and níl. This is in response to a question such as "An bhfuil tú ar son an rúin?"; and the answers are Tá mé ar son an rúin; or Níl mé ar son an rúin. Which is shortened to TÁ or NÍL.

Doubt.It

Yeah, I am not at all sure how I came to that understanding. I guess I'm conflating the voting convention of phrasing (say) a referendum motion so that it can be answered Tá/Níl, and the shorthand we used in school for yes/no responses, which - if I remember *this* correctly - was not sea/níl as in the OP but sea/ní hea.

deirdremf

Doubt.It wrote: »

Yeah, I am not at all sure how I came to that understanding. I guess I'm conflating the voting convention of phrasing (say) a referendum motion so that it can be answered Tá/Níl, and the shorthand we used in school for yes/no responses, which - if I remember *this* correctly - was not sea/níl as in the OP but sea/ní hea.

Not to worry, I've been corrected here too! Part of the usefulness (utility?) of a site like this is that it helps to get people back on the right track.
There's an all-Irish forum now, needs new posters badly: foramnagaeilge.com
Why don't you post there from time to time, it will help get you up to speed; or in Teach na nGealt.

Insect Overlord

This is the best forum to look in for grammar advice. Teach na nGealt is great for it as well, but is more focussed on general discussion. Sports, politics, current affairs, that kind of thing.

Fóram Na Gaeilge are currently working on combining the best of both, but it's only gradually building up its user-base. There tends to be a big cross-over of people between it and the new Irish Learner site. I'd recommend joining both. There's a good relationship between the two sets of Admins, as well as the overlap between the posters, and they're both great resources.