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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