Prepositions and the body

Roimhearan agus a’ bhodhaig

Which preposition do I use to talk about body parts, hair, eye colour, and the body?

This is just a quick recap. You use different pronouns and prepositional pronouns for eyes, and you can use several to describe any body part, including hair. This looks like a big chunk of information, but relax - you already know this.

Preposition: Eye colour

In English we say we have blue eyes, brown hair, big ears, a long nose or whatever, and in Gaelic we can use aig for this too. Gaelic also uses other prepositions for body descriptions. Eyes can be ‘in you’, and hair is usually ‘on you’.” So for eyes we need the list of ann an prep pronouns:

Here’s the ann an table again.

Preposition: Hair and body parts

For hair, ears and nose, we’ll need the list of air prep pronouns:

Here is the  air  table again:

Preposition: everything 

You can use  aig  (have) to talk about eyes, hair and body parts. Particularly if they are on other people. 

This is generally used to express items which are not physically close to you. There is another way of expressing possession usually used if you are talking about the following:  

People close to your heart 

Food 

Body parts 

The home 

Clothing 

We already met this when we were discussing body parts! 

The official name for this is the possessive article. If the article has * beside it, the following noun lenites.