tír mór

Irish

Alternative forms

  • tír mhór

Etymology

Literally, “big land”. The noun tír (“land”) is feminine in modern Irish, so lenition of the adjective mór (“big, great”) is expected and sometimes encountered. The standard form tír mór lacks lenition because tír was originally neuter, and adjectives are not lenited after neuter nouns. The lack of lenition has led Ó Dónaill’s dictionary to assign masculine gender to this phrase, but the only attested genitive is the unambiguously feminine na tíre móire.[1] It is therefore preferable to consider the phrase feminine but with irregular lack of lenition on the adjective.

Noun

tír mór f (genitive singular tíre móire)

  1. mainland

Declension

Declension of tír mór (second declension)
bare forms
singular plural
nominative tír mór —
vocative — —
genitive tíre móire —
dative tír mór —
forms with the definite article
singular plural
nominative an tír mór —
genitive na tíre móire —
dative leis an dtír mór
don tír mór 		—

Synonyms

Mutation

Mutated forms of tír mór
radical lenition eclipsis
tír mór thír mór dtír mór

Note: Certain mutated forms of some words can never occur in standard Modern Irish.
All possible mutated forms are displayed for convenience.

References

  1. ^ “tíre móire”, in Historical Irish Corpus, 1600–1926, Royal Irish Academy

Further reading

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