A characteristic feature of English grammar in Ireland is the so-called after perfect, also known as the hot news perfect or the immediate perfective. Popular throughout Ireland yet unfamiliar to most users of English elsewhere, it’s an idiosyncratic structure that emerged by calquing Irish grammar onto English. It has also undergone some curious changes over time.
The after perfect normally expresses perfect tense, using after to indicate that something occurred in the recent or immediate past, relative to the time of speaking or reference. It uses a form of the verb be, followed by after, then usually a verb in the progressive tense. BE + AFTER + [VERB]ING. I’m after meeting them means I met them a short time ago.
So I’m after summarising the after perfect. Now for some detail.
Past tense be-forms work too, so the after perfect can correspond to the past perfect (aka pluperfect). Instead of We had just arrived, an Irish person may say We were just after arriving. Just, only, and only just are often added to stress recency: We’re just after eating means we finished eating just moments ago. Be after can also license a noun phrase: Let her rest – she’s only after a swim. Or: I’ve no room for dessert yet – I’m just after dinner.
Robert Burchfield’s Modern English Usage, rare for a usage guide, has an entry on the construction, describing it as ‘unknown’ outside what he calls Anglo-Irish. P.W. Joyce, in English As We Speak It In Ireland, writes that neither present nor past tense form ‘would be understood by an Englishman, although they are universal in Ireland, even among the higher and educated classes’. Note, though, that modern sources label it informal.
I said that it comes from Irish: on this point linguists are agreed. This is because the language has no direct equivalent of have. Translating I have just done it into Irish involves be and one of several phrases meaning after, e.g.: Tá mé tar éis é a dhéanamh, or Tá mé i ndiaidh é a dhéanamh, both of which literally mean I am after doing it. (The underlined phrases mean after, as do iar and a haithle.)
Here are a few examples of the after perfect I’ve come across in Irish literature:
‘I’m after being in at the mart and the price of sheep is a holy scandal.’ (Claire Keegan, ‘Men and Women’, in Antarctica)
If we were after having some wet weather the earth would be damp and clammy, clinging to boots, knees and hands. (Alice Taylor, To School Through the Fields)
It’s after upsetting him more than anything ever upset him before in all our lives. (Donal Ryan, The Thing About December)
I shuddered when the shadow fell over me. Hickey laughed, his breath a white plume on the chilly air. ‘Is someone after walking across your grave?’ (Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know)
‘When you get a bit of heat at all like the heat we’re after getting today,’ he said, ‘the man below do be swimmin’ in his own melt.’ (Kevin Barry, ‘White Hitachi’, in Dark Lies the Island)
A small stone circle (c.1200 BC) I’m after seeing near Woodford in south Galway. Not pictured: two skittish deer that bounded away without delay.
About those changes I mentioned. In contemporary Irish English, the after perfect nearly always refers to recent events (or recent relative to the point of reference). But centuries ago it commonly referred to the future, e.g. ‘[my heart] will be after breaking outright’ for ‘will break’. Even Irish people who use the idiom routinely may not know this; none that I asked did.
The switch from future to past reference occurred over the 18th and 19th centuries, following patterns in Irish, resulting in what Ailbhe Ó Corráin calls a ‘profound functional shift’ in his detailed historical discussion ‘On the “After Perfect” in Irish and Hiberno-English’ (PDF). He describes a wide range of types and uses of the after perfect, and shows how:
the various functions assignable to the early Hiberno-English AFP [after perfect] may be derived from attestable uses in earlier stages of Irish. . . . What is particularly remarkable is that the evolution of the AFP in Irish (now with tar éis, i ndiaidh) is mirrored by the evolution of the AFP in HE.
Jeffrey Kallen, in his paper ‘The English language in Ireland’ (PDF), has helpful insights into the after perfect’s extended uses and pragmatic functions in modern Hiberno-English:
Speech act status and social closeness have a role to play in uses of the after perfect, since after perfects frequently occur in situations where the speaker draws attention to an event that is known to the listener but which forms the focus of chastisement, e.g. You’re after breakin the gate!. O’Keeffe and Amador Moreno (2009) similarly emphasise the function of ‘scolding’, including ‘self-inflicted or self-deprecating’ utterances with the after perfect.
He argues that the ‘chastising and self-critical’ uses of the after perfect in Hiberno-English ‘would not have the same pragmatic effect if rendered with the regular English have perfect’.
As with other Hiberno-English features, such as amn’t and haitch, the after perfect is subject to occasional censure. Years ago, on her Irish Times arts blog, Fiona McCann wrote: ‘Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is after winning the Booker prize’. A reader, Mimi, queried the idiom, Fiona explained it, but Mimi was unimpressed: ‘As I thought then, grammatically incorrect! . . . sounds a bit “Irish” to me’. Wrote the Irish Times reader.
Lest there be any uncertainty: the after perfect is grammatically impeccable, though not standard English. Every dialect has its own grammar, none more correct or advanced than any other. Standard English is one such dialect, socially privileged but not linguistically superior. People are often confused on this point, and may use grammar as a pretext for expressing suspicion or dislike of a group of people.
But I’m after getting sidetracked.
You may have noticed the potential for ambiguity. The peculiarly Hiberno-English use of after can produce phrases that are legitimate in standard English but carry a different meaning: where after conveys the idea of wanting or seeking something. Reader Adrian Morgan reports an example he overheard in Australia, while T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English quotes one from George Birmingham’s The Lighter Side of Irish Life (1912):
An Englishman who had settled in Ireland once related to me a conversation which he had with an Irish servant. ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘will you please light the fire in my study?’ ‘I’m just after lighting it,’ she replied. ‘Then do it at once,’ he said. ‘Don’t I tell you, sir,’ she said, ‘that I’m just after doing it?’
Nor is it just anecdotal. Shane Walshe’s Irish English as Represented in Film cites a study by Harris (1982) in which groups of native HibE speakers and native BrE speakers were asked the meaning of the line I’m after getting a cup of tea. 143 out of 145 of the Irish English group understood it to mean the person had just got a cup of tea; 51 of 63 BrE speakers understood it as an expression of desire for a cuppa.
Speaking of which, I’m after making a fresh pot. Is anyone after a cup, in either sense?
Update:
Here’s an interesting example of confusion over this. A horse-racing report on the Guardian sports blog included a quote from Irish jockey Rachael Blackmore:
“I just can’t believe I’m [talking] after winning the Grand National,” she said.
What she presumably said was: “I just can’t believe I’m after winning the Grand National”, i.e., “I just can’t believe I’ve just won the Grand National.” But a subeditor seems to have misinterpreted.
Sentence first 
Thoroughly enjoyable, and thank you for clearing up my initial confusion, as adumbrated in the quotation from George Birmingham. Not ‘aving the Irish (me, that is), could you clarify for me another suspicion, that the subsequent verb is indeed the progressive and not, as I, an English speaker, would take it to be, the present participle governed by an auxiliary, in the same way as the perfect (or whatever they call it nowadays) is ?
My apologies – written very late at night and a laboured joke turns out to be no such thing, as well as badly expressed. My uncertainty comes when you describe the form as “be, followed by after, then usually a verb in the progressive tense”. In UK English, ‘was going’ would normally be thought of as progressive, using ‘be’ and the present participle (or some might say, the gerund). My question is, what is the grammatical status of the additional verb in Irish – is it also the present participle or something else ?
I’m glad you enjoyed the post and that it resolved your earlier confusion. I think the Irish verb form is a gerund (or gerund-participle, as some modern linguists prefer to call it). My knowledge of Irish grammar is unreliable, though, so I invite readers who know more about this to weigh in if necessary.
Loved it! As I said on Facebook, Newfies are after doing this, too. Used to confuse the hell out of my mainland friends.
Thank you! I see there’s an entry (and supplement) in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English.
I have heard examples of this structure from maritime Canada. A news story reported that following a collision with a moose, a dazed driver was informed by a citizen coming to the rescue that, “You’re after hitting a moose!”
That’s a vivid example! I hope the moose was just dazed too.
neither present nor past tense form would be understood by an Englishman
It seems to me that every Stage Irish person, whether on the stage or in the movies, uses the AFP, and so Americans have at least heard it. It also seems fairly semantically transparent: we’re just after eating ‘we’re in the state which is just after (temporally) the state of eating’. This is even more obvious in I’m just after dinner.
[my heart] will be after breaking outright
Surely it’s the will, not the AFP, that carries the future meaning here: in terms of the gloss above, it means ‘My heart will be in the state which follows after it is in the state of breaking outright.
‘As I thought then, grammatically incorrect! . . . sounds a bit “Irish” to me’. Wrote the Irish Times reader.
Ahhh, what can you expect from the readers of a (formerly) Unionist paper? :-)
Some sources point out that Stage Irish versions of the AFP stray from authentic use, e.g., Séamas Moylan’s book Southern Irish English, quotes Máire Mhac an tSaoi’s ‘The Two Languages’ (1969):
Yes, will carries the future meaning, but after supplies the sense of completion; without it, will be breaking would indicate ongoing breaking, while will break focuses on the event of breaking without moving attention on to the post-breaking stage, as the AFP does.
This is so interesting, thanks for explaining. I’m trying to remember if I specifically remember being confused by this phrase. If I heard/saw it on TV, I probably understood it in the context of the scene. But if I’d read that before, I don’t think I understood what exactly the text was saying. Maybe I skipped over it and tried to keep up with whatever else was happening. I will try to notice this phrase from now on. And to answer your question, I’m just after a cup, and now I’m after another one :-)
You’re welcome, Cynthia. I’d imagine the surrounding context would quite often convey the meaning, and that genuinely ambiguous examples aren’t all that common. But the structure is so ingrained in my dialect that I find it hard to put myself in the shoes (or ears or eyes) of someone for whom it’s not a native idiom. So I can’t always tell how much potential for confusion or ambiguity there is. For example, I think in your last line you’ve just had a cup, and you want another, but that’s a guess based on semantic/pragmatic probability rather than syntax. :-)
That’s what I meant, Stan, but there was a big possibly that I was doing it wrong anyway, haha :-)
There’s a similar construction in Spanish, although a verb + preposition + infinitive (acabar + de + infinitive) is used instead of “after” + verb[ing].
Acabo de leer un blog muy interesante — I’m after reading a very interesting blog.
The immediacy of what has just happened is got across in very much the same way as with “after”.
Coincidentally, acabar + de is often used for scolding as well.
Acabas de romper la lampara — you’re after breaking the lamp.
Thanks, Ultan – that’s interesting and good to know. So it’s similar semantically but not so much lexically.
“We were just after arriving”…one cannot say this and NOT hear it in the voice of one of those adorable biddies in The Dead. Gosh, Irish is beautiful.
It is marvellous to think of the melding of grammars and to see the hybrid take root.
Just an aside, but ambiguous ‘after’ plays a role in one of my favorite lines from Mark O’Rowe’s ‘Howie The Rookie’…
‘She knows I’m after her…(in amorous sense)…Not ‘after’ her (punches fist)…just…’after’ her…’
Oh yes. It’s a bit like the ambiguity over ‘take care of’ someone. I haven’t read O’Rowe.
Thanks for this post, Stan;
I’ve heard this usage in “stage Irish” and when visiting Newfoundland but knew no name for it. Expecially I love the term “hot news.”
You can hear Newfoundland actor Alan Hawco explain the specific permutation “What’s after happening?” to a baffled mainlander TV host in this clip (starting at about 2:20)
Note that in the very silly Canadian TV show that made Hawco a star, where he played a Newfoundland P.I., his co-star, playing his Newfoundland father, was Irish actor Sean McGinley.
“[H]is co-star, playing his Newfoundland father, was Irish actor Sean McGinley.”
Who blended in fairly effortlessly without modulating his Irish accent at all.
Thanks for this, Elizabeth – the whole clip is very entertaining. Interesting too that the host thought What’s after happening now? meant ‘What are we doing next?’ Without any knowledge of the idiom, it’s a reasonable guess.
I like the term hot news perfect too, and it seems pretty common in linguistic literature. I tend to call it the after perfect to begin with, then mention the other one as a colourful complement.
I always enjoy reading your posts as they tend to point out usages I find reasonable (or actually use without thinking about) as a first generation New Yorker whose parents arrived from North Donegal (Inishowen) and Cavan (Bawnboy) just before (Yes, they were after arriving when they met and married), but which my classmates whose parents and grandparents taught them more standard English (of the American variety) were completely baffled by. I’ll be forwarding them a link here shortly.
FYI — I wouldn’t have produced it directly as an example of future perfect, but “will be after” was a common construction I heard often at home or with my grandparents (“Stop by about 6pm; we will be after having tea.”)
Liam
Thanks, Liam. It can be fun to have an phrase in your regular stock that discombobulates the people around you. Maybe a few have picked it up off you since. I’ve heard (and may have used) lines like We’ll be after having tea, though I think I’d be more likely to go straight to the noun phrase: We’ll be after [our] tea.
It occasionally still pops up here in the Ottawa Valley. Not surprising considering the Irish were a large part of the immigrant population that settled the area in the 19th Century.
That’s good to know, JJM. Thanks for confirming it.
Very interesting, Stan! I wonder whether there are two distinct afters: the temporal ‘after’ of the past (i ndiaidh/tar éis: I’m just after writing this sentence), and the ‘after’ of pursuit/chase (i ndiaidh/sa tóir ar: she’s after a seat in the Dáil, he’s after a wife), which could also be the future tense after, as in ‘I’m after a cup of tea.’ But I merely surmise.
Maybe, Mise. I’d need to look at more examples of the different Irish forms of it in different contexts. For me, though, I’m after a cup of tea describes a recent event, not a future desire, unless the context indicates otherwise.
I too enjoyed the post. Fowler wrote about this under ‘after’: ‘English novelists, rashly trying to represent Irish characters as speaking in their native idiom, almost always betray their ignorance of its subtleties. The most common mistake is their wrong use of the expression “I’m after doing so-and-so” …’
Another piece of Hiberno-English that springs to my mind is ‘You had a right to [do something]’, meaning ‘You should have [done something]’. It crops up a lot in speech in Angela Bourke’s book ‘The Burning of Bridget Cleary’, so it was used frequently in late 19th-century Tipperary. It’s certainly still used today.
Thanks, Brendan. There’s nothing under after in my copy of Fowler’s text (or in The King’s English). But the lines you quote appear in the second edition edited by Gowers. He says English novelists’ commonest mistake is to use the after perfect to mean someone wants to do something or is about to, which more or less tallies with the divergent interpretations of I’m after getting a cup of tea reported by Harris 1982.
To say someone had a right to meaning ‘should have’ is in my idiolect; I must have got it from my parents and maybe my extended family.
Does the Irish “after” perfect have a measurable half-life or expiration date? The American “hot news” perfect was often illustrated with breaking news expressions, like “the President has been shot,” that would sound distinctly odd used a couple of hours after the event. There’s even a book with that sentence as title, on the attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981. How long after being after a cup of tea is being after a cup of tea?
Good question. It definitely has a half-life, but I don’t know how measurable it is, and it probably varies quite a lot from person to person. For me, it’s generally restricted to minutes, but it could be extended a little if the past event bears directly upon the present discussion.
[…] interest, especially to English Language teachers, will be his post from 14 March 2016 about the ‘after perfect’ aspect in Irish English. For those of you interested in reading more about variations in Irish English […]
I enjoyed this Stan, never seen/heard this analysis of the “after” usage so familiar to me, very well done.
I’m after wondering did the word “afters” (i.e. dessert) ever feature in your childhood. It was always used in my house growing up.
XO
WWW
Thanks, WWW. I did hear (and sometimes use) afters, but more usually it was dessert. Or my siblings and I would ask for ‘something sweet’ or ‘a sweet thing’ or even ‘a thing in the press’, meaning chocolate from the cupboard. I remember finding it strange to learn that pudding is used in BrE to refer to any dessert, not a particular dish.
That always seems deeply weird to Americans, for whom pudding is far more specific. On the other hand, we find it strange that The Rest Of You have a lexical gap where the American use of candy goes: sweet is too broad, choc too narrow. (In AU and NZ there is lolly in this role, generalized from lollipop, just as candy is generalized from the sense ‘crystallized sugar’, rock candy in AmE.)
[…] are two more I’m just after reading, in Mary Beckett’s short story collection A Belfast Woman, from the story of the same […]
Talamh an Éisc (tall ‘ov on Ays’k) – the fishing ground – Newfoundland
[…] The after perfect is a grammatical construction common in Irish English but virtually unheard of elsewhere. It’s […]
[…] que cualquier otra persona de habla inglesa fuera de Irlanda comprensa esta estructura. Fuente: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/the-hot-news-or-after-perfect-in-irish-english/ […]
[…] both times in Bohane, and the first example also shows the grammatical feature known as the after perfect or hot news perfect in Irish English: ‘whatever was after going skaw-ways’ means ‘whatever had (just) gone […]
Hello, everyone1 Can anyone give me an example of The After Perfect used in films? Thank you very much.
Shane Walshe’s book Irish English as Represented in Film, linked in the post, has examples.
Odd. My NYC parents from Ireland (Clare) and their siblings never used the “after” construction, or perhaps I simply I do not recall hearing it. At any rate I immediately understood it when I encountered it written or spoken. But that may be due to my habit of paying close attention to context, something I definitely learned from my parents, and which I thought was an Irish thing.
Interesting. I’d be surprised if anyone from Clare never used the after perfect, since it’s the standard construction for people from that part of Ireland to express that particular tense.
When I visited my close relatives in Clare (near Limerick City) I was surprised at how “normal” their speech seemed to me (that is, not far from college educated East Coast US). It could be that my parents and relatives used the after construction but I found it so normal that I did not notice.
The children of the Irish relative who lived in Dublin also spoke an English not far from mine, although they did comment that my accent was different from theirs and more pleasant. They also found the accent of a cousin from the Bronx very pleasant (she visited them often, I did not). This cousin held a high ranking corporate position and spoke “educated” US East Coast English. She never used the after construction. That I would have noticed. The cousins in London spoke with a standard middle class English accent.
My mother went to teacher’s college in Limerick and taught school there before emigrating for reasons other than economic. Maybe that Limerick affected her manner of speech. But she commuted there (by bicycle) from the family farm in Clare, or so I have always thought.I saw a movie made in the 90’s that focused on middle class young people attending university in Limerick. Some of them sounded like my mother..
When I lived in the US Pacific Northwest everyone insisted that I could not be from NYC but must be Canadian (because of my accent). When my mother called and someone else picked up I was told there was some English woman on the phone (her accent was most definitely Irish).BTW, when my Limerick City uncle took me on the Ring of Kerry I sometimes had to “translate” for him what some of the Kerry people were saying. He asked how I could understand the accent so well. I told him that I grew up hearing a variety of Irish accents on my block in the Bronx. I think whatever accent I once might have had got washed away in high school (free, all scholarship private school drawing from the city and suburbs, mostly kids from non-immigrant parents) and college.(university) I did not visit Ireland until after university.
Many thanks for the details. I especially like the anecdote about translating Kerry English for a Limerick man.
An interesting number of parallels John. While I was also born of Irish parents, in the Bronx, and went to a free, private, all scholarship high school that drew from the city and the suburbs (There are a few, but not many. Regis?), I did hear this construction commonly at home. Not sure if the decades made a difference. Language seemed to become more generic more recently. I was born in the mid-60s and remember the 70s and 80s in NYC. Possibly the education my parents received (national school in Mom’s case as the oldest girl in a family of 8.
Secondary school in Dad’s case.)
Possibly I was more aware of it since we visited my grandparents in Ireland every couple of years as I grew up. And hearing it more often, I used it more often, and once I left my fairly Irish neighborhood in the Bronx (well, Irish, Jewish, German, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Haitian, etc so odd constructs were taken for granted) and ended up in high school for some long days, I got a lot of puzzled looks. Vowels sounds were different in some ways (hill as hull wasn’t too bad, but I took a lot of ribbing for rhyming heard with bared, not herd). Then also, my father’s north Donegal accent confused several of them (“I called your house and I couldn’t understand a word your father said. Was that English?”).
I then went to Massachusetts for college and found that they speak a different language up there. (It’s not a milkshake; it’s a frappe. It’s not a kaiser roll; it’s a bulkie. et cetera).
Regis, yes. I was never accused of having a Bronx accent. Quite the contrary I was accused of being a rich suburban boy. Why I don’t know. And when I graduated from college I fell in with a rich Wasp crowd and they thought I was one of them. Years later when I worked with young people in So Boston they liked talking to me but they all asked me if I were “Irish.” I said no, I was American, and more precisely American Irish, a sociological term used for people born in the USA from two parents born and raised in Ireland.The parents and grandparents recognized me as an Irish type but not the kids. The kids would also ask me what I though of black and white people dating. I told them that it worked out well among my relatives and produced some excellent marriages over in Ireland and England.
My extended family’s Irish diaspora produced all sorts of combinations in a number of countries, including marrying some un-moneyed descendants of Queen Victoria. When I went to college I got yelled at for being a spoiled rich suburban kid who knew nothing of life in the South Bronx, then the icon of urban poverty. I was raised in the So Bronx, 139th St to be exact, including after it became mostly Puerto Rican. I loved its constant activity and loony aspects, including the adults making entertainment in the middle of the street on hot summer nights, and us kids provoking the police by spraying water from the pumps into their cars. We lived there because that is what we could afford, and only moved when the landlord let the bldg deteriorate.
Once when I wandered off on a day trip to Salem, MA I admired a woman’s garden and named the flowers. We chatted very pleasantly, and she told me it was a pleasure to talk with an old New Englander and not one of those Irish.
Identity and accents are flexible, especially when you grow up with a variety of people and accents. As you point out about yours, my block was mostly Irish and Jewish but we had Greeks, Russians, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Cape Verdeans and maybe others. We even had one kid who had one parent born in the USA. Not the rest of us, except of course for the Puerto Rican kids, whose parents were all born in the USA. But mostly speaking Spanish, not English. We used to roller skate over to Harlem to play with the black kids there, and some of them came to our block to play. I thought Harlem was very nice. With no adults, and in mixed age groups, we used to regularly visit the museums in Manhattan. They were free then, with no one soliciting a “donation” at the doors. Other trips incliuded the Bronx Zoo, of course and other fascinating NYC places.
At home everyone read, mother and father quoted Shakespeare and Dickens and others at length and I was shocked at one point to hear my mother speaking rapidly in Irish (called Gaelic then) with a friend. Reading alone, and to each other, and doing math puzzles, were recreational activities on the parents’ farms, that is, when they were not engaged in armed rebellion or in fleeing Black and Tan raids. One of my mother’s houses was burned down on three separate raids. There were so many children – 20 in all,included 11 adopted nieces and nephews from a parental murder suicide – that they lived in three separate buildings. The British had reasons to target my mother’s place. Her older brother played a prominent role in the East Clare IRA Brigade. I have really enjoyed Peaky Blinders and Rebellion on Netflix. They have given me a sense of the times when my parents were young.
One of my father’s youngest brothers (USA) joined the US Army in WWII and fought on the Normandy beaches. He loved his time in England and was quite the entertainer in the music halls. Another brother, the youngest, joined the Metropolitan Police and married an Englishwoman from a titled Protestant family. She was a delightful and down to earth person. Their love stories – actually all the love stories from that generation as with some of those of the first cousins – are unusual and heartwarming. I have Jewish first cousins in Europe and one USA nephew married a Jewish woman. Marrying a Jewish person was looked upon favorably by my Irish relatives. And that held true for those of us in the USA.
One of my mother’s brothers (Ireland) made a fortune on the London Stock Exchange after WWII. He sent his only daughter to a convent school for the noble and the rich in Paris. She disliked what she saw there, became a Poor Clare nun, and gave her very large inheritance away to work among the poorest of the poor in Mexico. I actually met her at a convent in East Harlem as she made her way back to Ireland to get rid of all her money. Something out of TS Eliot.
One of my aunt’s had the literary and intellectual elite of NYC as clients for her party managing service and other services she performed. at very high rates. I grew up with stories about her clients. She was close with many of them, including Irving Berlin and Jacquie Kennedy. Only in NYC.
Despite all this Irishry in the background I really have no recollection of hearing the after construction. A complete blank. Again, I was familiar with it from some reading and I instantly understood it when, to my mind, I first heard it, in Ireland (as best I can remember). I never met any of my grandparents, maybe they used it. But none of their children and grandchildren did, in Ireland, the USA, England, France and Germany. I think it’s a very useful grammatical construction but not something that’s part of me.
[…] It’s gone the other way often enough in the past, of course. The origins of the English progressive (to be -ing) may well lie with the partical + verbal noun structure of Celtic. And contemporary Hiberno-English has a past tense construction to be after doing, roughly equivalen… […]
Hello all, this is so very interesting! I was investigating this particular turn of phrase as I recently came across it in a book, written by an Irish writer and set in Ireland, in which one of the characters who is coming down with something that later turns out to be pneumonia complicated by malaria mumbles: “Don’t know what’s after happening to me”. I’d never read or heard it before in English, and I took it to mean “I don’t know what is happening to me right now, right this moment while I am speaking”. And the reason I thought that is that there is a near-identical expression in the dialect of Milan, Northern Italy, which describes some action that is in the process of being done – sort of like “etre en train de faire quelque chose” in French (e.g., “What is Eliana doing? She’s after washing dishes in the kitchen” or “We’re all so used to smartphones and tablets by now that manual writing is after becoming a lost skill”). Now you tell me that I had it wrong. And there I was, thinking that I had found a trace of some ancient Celtic expression surviving the ages and cropping up in the very same speaking mannerism in Ireland and in Italy! But no, they’re really two different things. That’s what’s so fascinating about languages: you’re always discovering something new that you didn’t know you didn’t know! Thanks for all the interesting info.
You’re welcome, Eliana, and thank you for the interesting comment. I hope you weren’t disappointed for long after discovering the Irish idiom’s meaning and the absence of a connection to the Milan dialect.