Catalan to Irish: ag can express possession, a skill, or an ongoing action
A Catalan tenir construction does not need a separate Irish have verb
CPNL’s Catalan verb tables list tenir with personal forms including tinc and té. A source statement using that verb should be interpreted as a complete predicate before a corresponding Irish construction is selected.
Teanglann’s ag entry illustrates Tá teach agus talamh aige for somebody having a house and land. The possessor appears through a form of ag. This differs structurally from matching Catalan tenir to a single independent target verb. The relationship can remain faithful even when its grammatical packaging changes.
Possession and a person’s temporary presence are different readings
Teanglann also illustrates ag in constructions concerning a person staying with somebody or providing help. The same broad grammatical family can therefore describe more than legal or material ownership. Its interpretation depends on the noun and the complete situation.
For an original Catalan message about having a doctor visiting the home, the target should preserve the visit or availability of assistance. It must not imply ownership of the doctor. Conversely, a Catalan statement that someone owns a house should not be weakened into an accidental meeting with a person. Read the source relationship first: an owned object, a person present, and a service available are related uses of having but are not the same event.
A source ability can become a possessed skill in Irish
Teanglann gives Tá snámh aige for being able to swim and illustrates language knowledge through an ag construction. An Irish expression that looks like having can thus convey an acquired ability instead of possession of a physical thing.
A Catalan statement that someone knows how to swim should not be turned into a report that the person is swimming now. The skill can exist while the person remains on dry land. In a source contrast between a person’s swimming competence and their present location, preserve both propositions rather than interpreting the target’s ag as a single universal sign of an ongoing action.
Ag with a verbal noun can express the activity in progress
The same dictionary entry illustrates Tá sé ag caint for speaking in progress. Here ag participates in a verbal-noun construction; it is not the personal form identifying the owner of an object. The adjacent words and their grammatical roles distinguish the constructions.
In an original Catalan account saying that somebody speaks Irish but is speaking English during a call, the first proposition can concern linguistic knowledge while the second concerns an activity occurring now. A target should retain that contrast even if ag-related material appears in both expressions. Do not infer that the speaker has changed skills merely because the ongoing action uses another language, or report an ongoing conversation where the source asserts only an ability. Catalan personal endings and vocabulary establish who has the knowledge and who performs the action; the Irish target needs those relationships assigned to the appropriate constructions rather than a repeated word-for-word rendering of have or speak.
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