case of , ("of Donald") is the genitive form of ("Donald"). Several colours give rise to common Scottish surnames: (Bain – white), (Roy – red), (Dow, Duff – black), (Dunn – brown), (Bowie – yellow) although in Gaelic these occur as part of a fuller form such as 'son of the servant of', i.e. . Phonology Most varieties of Gaelic show either eight or nine vowel qualities () in their inventory of vowel phonemes, which can be either long or short. There are also two reduced vowels () which occur only in their short versions. Although some vowels are strongly nasal, instances of distinctive nasality are rare. There are about nine diphthongs and a few triphthongs. Most consonants have both palatal and non-palatal counterparts, including a very rich system of liquids, nasals and trills (i.e. three contrasting "l" sounds, three contrasting "n" sounds and three contrasting "r" sounds). The historically voiced stops have lost their voicing, so the phonemic contrast today is between unaspirated and aspirated . In many dialects, these stops may however gain voicing through secondary articulation through a preceding nasal, for examples "door" but "the door" as or . In some fixed phrases, these changes are shown permanently, as the link with the base words has been lost, as in "now", from "this time/period". In medial and final position, the aspirated stops are preaspirated rather than postaspirated. Grammar Scottish Gaelic is an Indo-European language with an inflecting morphology, verb–subject–object word order and two grammatical genders. Noun inflection Gaelic nouns inflect for four cases (nominative/accusative, vocative, genitive and dative) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). They are also normally classed as either masculine or feminine. A small number of words that used to belong to the neuter class show some degree of gender confusion. For example, in some dialects "the sea" behaves as a masculine noun in the nominative case, but as a feminine noun in the genitive (). Nouns are marked for case in a number of ways, most commonly involving various combinations of lenition, palatalisation and suffixation. Verb inflection There are 12 irregular verbs. Most other verbs follow a fully predictable paradigm, although polysyllabic verbs ending in laterals can deviate from this paradigm as they show syncopation. There are: Three persons: 1st, 2nd and 3rd Two numbers: singular and plural Two voices: traditionally called active and passive, but actually personal and impersonal Three non-composed combined