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So how do these languages (Scottish Gaelic and Irish) express affirmation and negation then? I couldn't find it on Wikipedia. I can imagine that affirmation would be a repeated variation on the question, as some languages do (e.g., "Have you got your ticket?" "I have it"), but negation?

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There is a word that negates a sentence/clause, just not a word for no. You're correct that we repeat the verb (tá is the independent form when no particle precedes it, fuil is the dependent form, which here has an initial mutation adding bh to its beginning). "Have you got your ticket?":

    - An              bhfuil do    thicéad agat?    (LIT: is your ticket at-you?)
    - (interrogative) is     your  ticket  at-you?

    - Tá mo thicéad agam.
    - is my ticket  at-me.

In the negative, we'd use the particle Ní and the form fhuil: Ní-fhuil (lit: Not-is) which is nowadays written and pronounced as Níl:

    - Níl      mo thicéad agam.
    - Ní-fhuil
    -  not-is  my ticket at-me.

Another example using a more regular verb: "do you sing?"

   - An              gcanann tú?
   - (interrogative) sing    you?

   - Canann mé  /  Canaim
   - sing   I   /  sing-1st.pres

   - Ní  chanann mé   / Ní  chanaim
   - not sing    I    / not sing-1st.pres

Note that there are two forms an analytic and a synthetic form that incorporates the pronoun into the verb that can be used depending on dialect and speaker. I've included both above.

EDIT: Unfortunately, code blocks are necessary for alignment, so I've added '-' to the beginning of each line to aid in legibility on mobile.

You should know that your code blocks are complete gibberish on mobile browsers.

Apologies. I'm aware of the issues with code blocks on mobile, and I myself even call people out who used them instead of quotes. Here though, I used text alignment to aid in showing which words in Irish correspond to their translation in English, so a monospaced font was necessary as HN doesn't provide any other means of alignment.

EDIT: I viewed my comment on mobile, and I don't think it's completely gibberish as the commenter suggested. I use a relatively small phone (an iPhone SE 2020), and found it readable. That said, I've added '-' to the beginning of each line to aid in legibility for anybody experiencing issues.

Thanks, most informative.

Apart from Donegal, you won't really find the analytic first person singular present anywhere outside of the verbs tá and bíonn. Even in Donegal, the synthetic is best.

Also, you don't have to repeat the pronoun (unless it is one with the analytic form).

An gcanann sé? Canann.

> Apart from Donegal, you won't really find the analytic first person singular anywhere outside of the verbs tá and bíonn

Have you mixed up analytic and synthetic? Analytic = Canann mé, Synthetic = canaim. Ulster irish generally tends toward analytic (similar to Scottish Gaelic actually), and Munster tends toward the Synthetic.

> Also, you don't have to repeat the pronoun (unless it is one with the analytic form).

True, but I didn't want to complicate it any further than it already was.

No, the synthetic first person singular present tense is still more prevalent, even in Donegal. Overall, yes, Donegal (the only living Ulster dialects, as I'm sure you're aware) tends towards analytic, but they're not that common in some tenses. An Teanga Bheo: Gaeilge Uladh (horrible name, East Ulster was very different from Donegal!) mentions that you can say canann mé but that canaim is still preferred. Same with a few of the persons in the conditional mood.

Ah yeah, that makes sense. I glossed over "first person singular" in the part I quoted.

> Canann

Interesting; same root as Italian 'cantare'.

Yep! They both come from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) keh₂n-.

As a matter of fact, the Italic and Celtic branches of PIE are posited to be closer than to each other than other Indo-European branches and are often grouped together as Italo-Celtic.

In Scottish Gaelic you'd use "Tha" or "Chan eil" to literally say "yes" or "no".

"Tha" - pronounced like "Haa" - is more like "It is" or "I am", "A'bheil thu sgìth?" "Tha, tha mi sgìth." "Are you tired?" "Yes, I am tired".

"Chan eil" - the "ch" is like in "loch", that back-of-the-throat sound, and "eil" is like "ale" - is a syntactically gendered form of "Cha" and "bheil", where the "bh" pronounced a bit like a "v" is dropped and an "n" is added. "Syntactically gendered" isn't like male female person gender, it's like plug socket gender - you can't say "Cha eil" because there's a stupid-sounding stop in it, like you can't say "a apple". You'd say "*an* apple" so you've got a consonant between the vowel sounds.

But yeah in general I'd ask you "Are you hungry?" and you'd say "I'm not" or "I am" rather than "No" or "Yes".

Of course modern Gaelic is a heavily code-switched language so you'd probably just use "No" or "Yes" directly anyway if you were speaking in a modern idiom.

Hmm. If I asked the following (forgive my spelling/grammar, it's be a while since I've studied Scottish Gaelic, so I've probably fecked up the mutations and question particle, I've put what I intend it to mean in English)

> Am bidh thu sgìth? Are you tired? (regularly)

Would you answer "Bidh", "Tha", or "Tha, bidh mi sgìth"?

I'm not sure, to be honest, probably the latter is most correct.

> as some languages do (e.g., "Have you got your ticket?" "I have it"), but negation?

They say "I haven't it" (they negate the verb)

(Which in English sound weird, but you can negate the verb without using 'no')

I mean practically Níl on its own is no in actual spoken Irish, but that is a relatively recent usage that came about because approximately all Irish speakers learned English as a first language and want to import the usage.

But yes, officially and historically the correct response was like "Níl aon tickead agam" or "There is no ticket on me", or less directly translated/less awkwardly "I don't have a ticket"

It depends on the speaker, the usage is much more common among people who haven't learned the language to any degree of fluency (which is the majority of people who claim to speak Irish). Hearing "Níl" in response to a question that didn't involve "An bhfuil?" still sounds off to me, but languages change over time.

> but languages change over time.

I would argue there's a difference between natural language change among natives and language change because learners can't/won't learn something right. What we're actually seeing isn't language change, but language shift (in the Gaeltacht), where Irish loses all that separates it from English as English creeps in, and language formation (outside the Gaeltacht) as a sort of Gaelo-Anglo pidgin/creole is being formed.

As a Spaniard living in Ireland I couldn't detect much difference in how the Irish I heard at the popup gaeltacht event sounded compared to English as a language (though when I first visited Kerry I thought some of the older men were speaking Gaelic because of how they spoke English)

I'd expect people to not want their Irish to sound so like English (jibberish English like the Simms) but it doesn't seem to be something learners or educationists care about or are aware of

There's two factors there though. The first is how English accents in those localities have been influenced by historic use of Irish there. The second is how the accents learners of Irish are now being influenced by English phonetics.

The biggest problem with the latter is a lot of learners don't grasp the Slender/Broad consonants distinction at all (it's a palatilization/velarization distinction similar to the soft/hard distiction in Slavic languages).

Honestly, most people don't know and don't care. They use their little phrase 'Broken Irish is better than clever English' to hide/dismiss any concerns as well. It's a huge issue though -- the native sounds are dying, and learners are killing them. Put off by saying "Oh, it's just my dialect" (it's not, you're not a native speaker; you don't have a dialect!)

Really? This must be a very recent change. If your teacher asked you "An dTuigeann Tú?" ("do you understand?"), they would accept "Níl" as an answer? It sounds horribly off to me.

Teachers would also correct someone asking "Can I <do XYZ>?" to "May I <do XYZ>?", but the former would be perfectly accepted in regular conversation. Academic standards are (well, usually and hopefully) higher than conversational standards.

When I visited Ireland, one of the defining characteristics of the Irish dialect of English was the absence of yes/no - it definitely stood out to me that people would respond to stuff like "did you eat lunch?" with "I did".

Weird to see that not only has yes/no come into the English spoken in Ireland, but is now being backported to the Gaelic.

You have to admit yes and no are pretty useful words!

I don't ;)

Fair enough :)

I don't quite understand the point you're trying to make. "I haven't it" and "I don't have it" are essentially the same: the clitic "n't" applied to a verb to negate it. In one case you use an auxiliary verb and in another you don't, but the method of negation is the same.

I think the point is that they can't simply say "no". Also, perhaps "I haven't it" is syntactically more similar than "I don't have it" to what they actually say.

> perhaps "I haven't it" is syntactically more similar than "I don't have it" to what they actually say

Neither is particularly close, as Irish doesn't have a verb for have, and uses Verb-Subject-Object rather than Subject-Verb-Object as english does:

    - I haven't  it
    - I have-NEG it

    - I don't   have it
    - I NEG.AUX have it

    - Níl    sé     agam
    - is-NEG it.NOM at-me

(Saying that "sé" is nominative isn't quite accurate, it's a little bit more subtle than that, but it's close enough).

So something like "It isn't here", with the qualification that "here" doesn't quite express the contrasts available?

More like, "It's not with me", at least in Hiberno English. We'd also say "on me" (in Hiberno-English) for possession, although it means that you have it on your immediate person:

"Do you have it?"

"Not on me / I don't have it on me" = it's not on my person.

I aint is an old but still used negation of to have. So: "Got your ticket"? "I aint"! However this is heading into regional variance territory. Granny Weatherwax (Discworld witch) famously wore a sign saying: "I aten't dead" when off Borrowing.

Sounds like most of them just negate the operative verb in the question.

Do you have a pen? Have Not have

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