An Tràigh

Habemus infinitivum necne

No, not showing off, I had to ask a friend to correct my Latin (it's been a long time!) and there's a reason for the Latin name to the page. Here's a clue, it loosely translates as We have an infinitive, or do we?.

First things first

What's an infinitive and would it go with a glass of Château Musar? Probably as to the latter. As to the former, it's actually hard to say what it exactly is because the definition of the infinitive varies slightly depending on which language you're looking at.

Coming at it from English, the infinitive is often described as the dictionary form (also called the citation form) - for example to go or, dropping the to, simply go. It gets more complicated than that but I want to sidestep the definition of what the infinitive precisely is in English because it's a bit of a head-bender (and that's me you're talking to!) - plus it's not really a helpful concept for Gaelic as we'll see.

So anyway, this thing called the infinitive crops up in many European languages. For example in Spanish, the basic form of verbs (those ending in -ir, -er or -ar) is referred to as the infinitive (this also being the form you look for in the dictionary). For example morir "(to) die" or masticar "(to) chew". In German, the equivalent is -en, for example bedienen "(to) serve" or verniedlichen "(to) make cute". And so on.

What's the attraction?

Well... the infinitive is the basis for inflection on the whole (if the language in question inflects the language). Ignoring irregular verbs, if in English you know (to) place then you know that by adding -(e)d you get the past, by adding -(e)s you get the he/she/it form (he/she/it places) and by adding -ing you get the participle (placing).

You can also use them to make ungrammatical but somewhat intelligible sentences if you're not fluent. So something like I place money here yesterday or Ich lesen Buch, while not grammatical, can be understood. Which is why the infinitive is one of the first verb forms learners of English, German, Spanish or French learn, it allows you to say a lot relatively fast.

What about languages which are not English?

Depends. Some languages outside the Indo-European family entertain the idea of an infinitive. Others go even further and don't inflect at all - such as Cantonese where the verb 生 (sāng "to give birth) does not change at all. No endings, no prefixes, no suffixes, no he/she/it -s ... nothing like that. You can add a word like 咗 (jó) to indicate that this was in the past but jó is seen as an independent word, not part of sāng.

And then there are languages which entertain neither concept. Many Native American languages have nothing even approaching an English infinitive, as in, something that is wholly un-inflected, un-changed and basic. So what happens in a Lakhóta dictionary then, you might ask? No sweat. Lakhóta considers the most basic form of a verb to be the 3rd person singular. So while an English dictionary will list (to) sing, Lakhóta will list lowáŋ "he/she/it sings". Because if you look at the whole shebang, you'll see this is the form with the least amount of 'bits' stuck ok:

walowáŋ	I sing
yalowáŋ	you sing
lowáŋ	he/she/it sings
uŋlowáŋ	we two sing
uŋlowáŋpi	we (more than two) sing
yalowáŋpi	you (plural) sing
lowáŋpi	they sing

Which brings us to Gaelic. In a Gaelic dictionary, the most un-inflected, un-changed and basic form of a verb is considered to be the imperative. The form you use to order people around.

leugh!	read!
seinn!	sing!
gearr!	cut!

That is because once you know what the imperative is, you can derive all but one of the required verb forms by applying a set of rules. Again, we're ignoring irregular verbs. So using gearr! as an example, you get the following:

gearr	gearraidh	to form the independent future, add -(a)idh to the imperative
ghearras	to form the relative future of a word beginning with b/c/d/g/m/p/s/t, lenite the initial and add -(e)as at the end
ghearramaid	to form the conditional of a word beginning with b/c/d/g/m/p/s/t, lenite the initial and add -(e)amaid at the end

And so on. It's a fairly long list but on the whole entirely predictable.

The only form that is not predictable is the verbal noun. So just by looking at gearr, it's hard to guess how to say "cutting". It could be gearradh or gearrachdainn or gearramh or gearrail or gearrachd... and while there are usually forms common to many areas which are preferred (in this case gearradh), there is usually a lot of variation between dialects. So while one areas says gearradh, another might prefer gearrachdainn. Which isn't as confusing as it may sound because it's almost always clear from the word order that it is or isn't a verbal noun and in many cases, people are relatively used to not everyone using the same ending for verbal nouns.

Get to the darned infinitive already

Well, in a sense, you already have half the answer. If you equate the English infinitive with "the basic form of a verb that's listed in a dictionary" then you already know that this does not apply to Gaelic since Gaelic uses the imperative for this purpose.

But yes, there's a bit more to this story, because you're probably thinking of expressions like tha mi a' dol a bhualadh cù "I am going to hit a dog" or bu toigh leam a dhol a Ghlaschu "I want to go to Glasgow"

I've talked about this before - it's important to make a distinction between how something is constructed and how it's translated. On the face of it, this looks like an infinitive. After all, the English equivalent has "to go" and there's that handy little word a which the dictionary tells me means "to".

Yes, except you probably ignored the bit where it says prep. or something like that. Let's analyse our two Gaelic sentences word for word:

bu	toigh	leam	a	dhol	a	Ghlaschu
COND	agreeableness	with.me	to	LEN.going	to	LEN.Glasgow

Sortable table

Alphabetic	Numeric	Date	Unsortable
d	20	2008-11-24	This
b	8	2004-03-01	column
a	6	1979-07-23	cannot
c	4	1492-12-08	be
e	0	1601-08-13	sorted.