Person: person
Person is a feature of prepositions, personal and possessive pronouns and verbs. In synthetic verbforms, this feature marks the subject number.
0: autonomous
There is no passive form in Irish. However, the Irish impersonal verbform is similar to the passive construction, in that the agent of the verb can be omitted. In this construction, the subject remains anonymous (as a dummy subject indicated through suffixation) and the object remains in the accusative case, as opposed to the nominative case used in the passive voice in English.
The impersonal verb is inflected with varous suffixes depending on the final vowel of the root (broad/slender) and on the tense: -t(e)ar in the present tense, -(e)adh in the past tense, -f(e)ar, in the future tense, and -f(a)í in the conditional.
Examples
| Verb | Present | Past | Future | Conditional |
| Cuir "To put" | cuirtear | cuireadh | chuirfear | chuirfí |
| Cas "To turn" | castar | casadh | casfar | chasfaí |
| Déan "To make/do" | déantar | rinneadh | déanfar | dhéanfaí |
1: first person
The first person refers to the speaker; singular first person includes just one speaker, while plural first person includes many speakers, or groups the speaker with others. In Irish synthetic verbs, the first person is reflected in the suffix morphology.
Examples
- Dúnaim “I close”
- Tuigim “I understand”
- Dúnaimid “We close”
- Tuigimid “We understand”
- agam “At me”
- Romhainn “Ahead of us”
- ár n-aontas leis an Eoraip “our agreement with Europe”
2: second person
The second person refers to the listener. The singular first person denotes just one listener, while the plural form denotes several listeners. Imperative verbs have an understood 2nd person subject even when there is no suffixation present.
Examples
- Dúnann tú/sibh “You(sing/pl) close
- Tuigeann tú/sibh “You(sing/pl) understand
- Féach! “(You) look!”
- Bígí ann “(You pl) be there!”
- agaibh “at you (pl)”
- do sheoladh “your (sg) address”
- bhur dtacaíocht “your (pl) support”
3: third person
The third person refers to one or more persons who are not present, i.e. neither speakers nor listeners. While, some verbs forms (e.g. conditional, past imperfect) mark the 3rd person plural synthetically, it is more common to use the 3rd person pronoun with the analytical verbforms.
Examples
- Dúnann sé/sí/siad “He/she/they close(s)
- Tuigeann sé/sí/siad “He/she/they understand(s)
- é “him”
- iad“they”
- ina “in his/hers/its/their”
- go ndéanfaidís “that they would make”
- an t-ainm a thugaidís ar a n-athair “the name they used to give to their father”
Person in other languages: [aqz] [arr] [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [en] [es] [eu] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gn] [gub] [hbo] [hu] [hy] [it] [ka] [ky] [myu] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [quc] [ru] [sl] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj] [xcl]