Linda,

Usually, a sentence like "I was at the killing of the man" would be
correctly interpreted as "I was killing the man." However, if you wanted to
add an inanimate object in there (Latin's ablative of means or instrument!),
it would go something like this:

I was at the killing of the man with a knife.

Translated into idiomatic English:

I was killing/killed the man with a knife.

Your subject will almost always be a person, or at least it is in the
exercises and few actual Gaelic excerpts my classmate and I have translated.
You probably wouldn't say in English, "The rope was hanging the man," since
an actual person had to put him up there (although you could make an
argument for this case). "The knife was killing the man" sounds a bit odd,
however, since we normally think of the person behind the knife as killing
the man. But, in English, you could probably argue in support of these
cases; in Gaelic, you would usually have a preposition such as "with" or
"by" accompanying the object.

If Gaelic had a verb for "to brown (as in a turkey)," you can bet your boots
I'd be writing sentences on the board about my Thanksgiving holiday just to
give my teacher a laugh.

Allison

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