stems and roots in Irish - help!

Starr27

Hi everyone, I am learning Irish at the moment, but I cannot seem to work out how the stems and roots of words change depending on how you want to use them in sentences, for example

success
successful
successfully

educate
education
educational

Does anyone know of a system in the Irish language, that I can learn that will solve this problem?

thanks for your help!

Starr27

brianeanna

There are no guides that I know of (but there aren't any for English either).

Irish morphology does have a system, but it's a shade more complicated.

So, for instance, you can sometimes make verbs from nouns by adding -áil.

You can make sometimes make adjectives from nouns by adding -ach.

You can sometimes make adverbs from adjectives by prefixing with "go".

Why not buy the big Ó Dónaill dictionary and look at how certain words can have different forms? I'm randomly opening mine and finding, for example:

marthain
marthanach
marthanacht
marthanaí
marthanas
marthanóir

Lots to go on just there!

-B

franc 91

There are prefixes that are incorporated into words such as - fo (under), neamh (un-), comh (with, joint, common etc), droch (bad), sean (old), lamh (with a fada on the 'a') (hand), fior (with a fada on the 'i') (true, pure, real), dea- (good), ath- (re-), taobh (side), oll (great, super), mion (small, minor), mi (with a fada on the 'i') (bad, ill-), mean (with a fada on the 'a') (medium, middle) and so on - srl - which gives you some idea of how words are put together in Irish.

deirdremf

I replied to this question on another thread recently:

deirdremf wrote: »

Ta liostai i gCaibidil 24 de Ghraiméar Gaeilge na mBráithre Críostaí

http://ec.europa.eu/translation/irish/documents/christian_brothers_comprehensive_irish_grammar_ga.pdf

Ádh mór

Starr27

Thanks everyone!