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GAELIC GRAMMAR. 29
Plural.
And so on with other Prepositions.
It is worth paying some attention to these, for not only
does a knowledge of them — not necessarily by rote — make
the grammatical construction of sentences much easier to
understand, but also because in them we find interesting
relics of the older and less perverted language, which we
cannot wisely neglect. In the spoken language we, for ex-
ample, constantly confound do and de. Greim do'n aran, for
a Inte of bread, and earran do'n t-sluagh, for a portion of the
people, are wrong. It should be de'yi aran, de^n t-sluagh.
We have only to look at their pronominal combinations to
see at once how different these prepositions are.
Again, we look on hhuam as the proper form, and we write
'nam, as if the word were defective. But if we know that
o and ua are the correct form of the preposition, hhuam =
blio mi (instead of = «« mi = nam), is wrong. Thus one of
our too many dots goes. Ceud gun leth, again, is not sense.
Literally it means, a hundred trithout half ; whereas the pur-
posed value of the phrase is, a hundred and a half (hundred).
If we know that gri equals Lat. , con, ivith, then Ceud gu leth
is sense — a hundred u-ith half, or to half, in modern value.