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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

> 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"

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.

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!)

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.

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