Talk:toigh

Scottish Gaelic

In Scottish Gaelic, Dwelly documents a supposed form 'toigh'. Something like /tə l-/ does exist. Since this occurs in the environment 'toigh le-' is this even real or is it a (pointless?) back-formation from toil?CecilWard (talk) 07:56, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

• @CecilWard: I have no idea, but isn't this also the Gaelic word for "house"? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 14:56, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

@Mahāgaja: Antony, I forgot to point out that the Dwelly entry (see http://www.dwelly.info s.v. “toigh”) rules out the house interpretation and confines itself to the periphrastic phrasal verb construction with ‘is’ and ‘le’ eg ‘I like it’.

As for the house, as far as I am aware it isn't often spelled that way nowadays, ”toigh”, but in Dwelly’s day spelling was different, and what’s more ”toigh” is indeed a very justifiable orthographic choice as an alternative to the {taigh} for house (cf in tigh) _in some dialectal areas_ at any rate. The vowel is in some areas pronounced more like a [ɤ] or a schwa, or to my ears like an ö in German but very very short.

But the word for ‘house’ doesn't sound the same anyway, as ‘taigh’ has a final faint [j], and returning to the supposed ‘toigh le <x>’ for ‘like’, in my experience I've never heard anything with that final [j], so we have eg [s ˈt̪ʰələm] / [ˈst̪ʰələm]] (and never *[s ˈt̪ʰəj ləm]) for ‘I like it’. (Actually ‘(an) taigh leam-sa’ would mean ‘my house’ (ie I own it) so I’ve just realised that ‘taigh le’ is a valid form! But the stress in the latter would always have to be on the prepositional pronoun there, unlike in the ‘like’ idiom so they only appear the same when written.)

I wonder where the great Edward Dwelly got that idea from?

I just assume that the only historical basis is OIr ‘tol’ (http://www.dil.ie/41316) > ‘toil’ (as in ‘will’ [noun] in ModScG). Are there other possible historical contenders?

I wonder if Scottish Gaelic is toigh liom (“I like”) come from a confusion of is toil liom with a phrase equivalent to Irish is dóigh liom (“it seems to me”)? —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 11:01, 23 March 2018 (UTC)