Old Irish language

Old Irish is the name given to the oldest form of the Irish language which can be, more or less, fully reconstructed from extant sources. It dates from the 6th to the 10th century when it gives way to Middle Irish.

Old Irish first appears in the margins of Latin religious manuscripts dating as early as the 6th century. A large number of early Irish literary texts, though recorded in manuscripts of the Middle Irish period such as Lebor na hUidre and the Book of Leinster, are essentially Old Irish in character.

It should be noted that while Old Irish is the ancestor to Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx Gaelic, it is most definitely distinct from these. In general, the modern languages are both morphologically and phonologically less complex than Old Irish.

Modern Old Irish scholarship is still greatly influenced by the works of a small number of individuals such as Rudolf Thurneysen (1857-1940) and Osborn Bergin (1873-1950). Even today, their books are regarded as required material for any enthusiast of Old Irish.

Fragments, mainly personal names, of an earlier form of the language (known as Primitive Irish) are known from inscriptions in the Ogham alphabet in Ireland and western Britain dating as late as the 4th century.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Old Irish is shown in the chart below. represent fortis sonorants whose precise articulation is unknown, but which were probably longer, tenser, and generally more strongly articulated than their lenis counterparts .

Consonants of Old Irish
		Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	Velarized ("broad")
Plosive	Palatalized ("slender")
Nasal	Velarized ("broad")
Nasal	Palatalized ("slender")
Fricative	Velarized ("broad")
Fricative	Palatalized ("slender")
Nasalized fricative	Velarized ("broad")
Nasalized fricative	Palatalized ("slender")
Approximant	Velarized ("broad")
Approximant	Palatalized ("slender")
Lateral approximant	Velarized ("broad")
Lateral approximant	Palatalized ("slender")

Some details of Old Irish phonetics are not known. may have been pronounced or , as in Modern Irish. may have been the same sound as and/or . and may have been pronounced and respectively. The difference between and may have been that the former were trills while the latter were flaps.

Vowels

The inventory of Old Irish monophthongs is:

Monophthongs of Old Irish
	Short		Long
Close ("high")
Mid
Open ("low")

The distribution of short vowels in unstressed syllables is a little complicated. All short vowels may appear in unstressed final open syllables (an open syllable is one with no coda consonant), after both broad and slender consonants. The front vowels and are often spelled ae and ai after broad consonants, which might indicate a retracted pronunciation here, perhaps something like and . All ten possibilities are shown in the following examples:

Unstressed vowels in absolute final position
marba 'kill' (1 sg. subj.)	léicea 'leave' (1 sg. subj.)
marbae 'kill' (2 sg. subj.)	léice 'leave' (2 sg. subj.)
marbai 'kill' (2 sg. indic.)	léici 'leave' (2 sg. indic.)
súlo 'eye' (gen.)	doirseo 'door' (gen.)
marbu 'kill' (1 sg. indic.)	léiciu 'leave' (1 sg. indic.)

In unstressed closed syllables (that is, those with a syllable coda), the quality of a short vowel is almost entirely predictable by whether the surrounding consonants are broad or slender. Between two broad consonants, the vowel is , as in dígal 'vengeance' (nom.). Between a broad and a slender consonant the vowel is , as in dliged 'law' (nom./acc.). Before a slender consonant the vowel is , as in dígail 'vengeance' (acc./dat.), and dligid 'law' (gen.). The chief exceptions to this pattern are that frequently appears when the following syllable contained an *ū in Proto-Celtic (for example, dligud 'law' (dat.) < PC *dligedū), and that or frequently appears after a broad labial (for example, lebor 'book'; domun 'world').

The inventory of Old Irish diphthongs is shown in this chart:

Diphthongs of Old Irish
Long (bimoraic)					Short (monomoraic)

Orthography

As with most medieval languages, the orthography of Old Irish is not fixed, so the following statements are to be taken as generalizations only; individual manuscripts may very greatly from these guidelines.

The Old Irish alphabet consists of the following eighteen letters of the Latin alphabet:

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u

In addition, the acute accent and the superdot are used as diacritics with certain letters:

The acute accent indicates a long vowel: á, é, í, ó, ú are long vowels
The superdot indicates the lenition of f and s: ' is silent, ' is pronounced
The superdot is also sometimes used on m and n with no change in pronunciation, when these letters are used to mark the nasalization mutation: ', '.

A number of digraphs are also used:

The letter i is placed after a vowel letter to indicate that the following consonant was slender: ai, ei, oi, ui; ái, éi, ói, úi

The letter h is placed after c, t, p to indicate a fricative: ch, th, ph

The diphthongs are also indicated by digraphs: áe/aí, ía, uí, áu, óe/oí, úa, éu, óu, iu, au, eu

In word-initial position, when no initial consonant mutation has applied, the consonant letters have the following values; they are broad before back vowels (a, o, u) and slender before front vowels (e, i):

b:
c:
d:
f:
g:
h: See discussion below
l:
m:
n:
p:
r:
s:
t:

Although Old Irish has both a sound and a letter h, there is no consistent relationship between the two. Vowel-initial words are sometimes written with an unpronounced h, especially if they are very short (the preposition i "in" was sometimes written hi) or if they need to be emphasized (the name of Ireland, Ériu, was sometimes written Hériu). On the other hand, words that begin with the sound /h/ are usually written without it, for example a ór "her gold". If the sound and the spelling cooccur, it is by coincidence, as ní hed "it is not".

After a vowel or l, n, or r the letters c, p, t can stand for either voiced or voiceless stops; they can also be written double with either value:

mac or macc "son"
bec or becc "small"
op or opp "refuse"
brat or bratt "mantle"
brot or brott "goad"
derc "hole"
derc "red"
daltae "fosterling"
celtae "who hide"
anta "of remaining"
antae "who remain"

After a vowel the letters b, d, g stand for the fricatives or their slender equivalents:

dub "black"
mod "work"
mug "slave"
claideb "sword"
claidib "swords"

After m, b is a stop, but after d, l and r it is a fricative:

imb "butter"
odb "knot (in a tree)"
delb "image"
marb dead

After n and r, d is a stop

bind "melodious"
cerd "art, skill"

After n, l, and r, g is usually a stop, but it is a fricative in a few words:

long "ship"
delg or delc "thorn"
argat or arggat "silver"
ingen "daughter"
bairgen "loaf of bread"

After vowels m is usually a fricative, but sometimes a (nasal) stop, in which case it is also often written double:

dám "company"
lom or lomm "bare"

The digraphs ch, ph, th do not occur in word-initial position except under lenition, but wherever they occur they are pronounced .

ech "horse"
oíph "beauty"
áth "ford"

The letters l, n, and r are written double when they indicate the tense sonorants, single when they indicate the lax sonorants. (But the tense sonorants are usually written single in word-initial position.)

corr "crane"
cor "putting"
coll "hazel"
col "sin"
sonn "stake"
son "sound"

Syntax

Old Irish follows the typical VSO (verb-subject-object) structure shared by most Celtic languages. Verbs are all fully conjugated, and have most of the forms typical of Indo-European languages, i.e. present, imperfect, past, future and preterite tenses, indicative, subjunctive, conditional and imperative moods, and active and passive voices. The only verbal form lacking in Old Irish is the infinitive (present to a limited degree in Modern Irish), the meaning of which Old Irish conveyed with verbal noun constructions. Personal pronouns, when used as direct objects, are infixed into the verb with which they are associated. What equate to prepositions in English are generally in the same placement as Old Irish, though a good many with verbal overtones are actually infixed into the verbs themselves.

Morphology

Nouns

Old Irish maintained three genders, namely, masculine, feminine and neuter; three numbers, namely, singular, plural and dual, with the third number, dual, being attested only to a limited degree with somewhat distinct forms, though it is almost always preceded by the cardinal dá, meaning "two"; and five cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive and dative). Thurneysen had fourteen classes of noun, defined by the morphological marking on the stem, with seven vocalic stems and seven consonantal stems (including one class of irregular and indeclinable nouns).

Declension of ā-stem in *túath* (fem.), "tribe".
	Singular	Plural	Dual
Nominative	túath	túatha	túaith
Vocative	túath	túatha	-
Accusative	túaith	túatha	túaith
Genitive	túa(i)the	túath
Dative	túaith	túath(a)ib

Verbs

Verbs stand initially in the sentence (preceded only by some particles, forming a 'verbal complex' and very few adverbs). Most verbs have, in addition to the tenses, voices, and moods named above, two sets of forms: a conjunct form, and an absolute form. The conjunct form typically consists of one or more preverbs (particles some of which are historically of prepositional origin, compare a-, e-, in-, etc. in Latin verbs, though not directly related and verbal prefixes in Germanic languages), followed by a verb stem which bears the bulk of the conjugation. Personal pronouns as direct objects are infixed between the preverb and the verbal stem, along with various other particles that modify the verb's meaning (including the negative) or indicate certain special sentence structures. The absolute form is used when no infixes are necessary, and any other necessary elements are given in another part of the sentence. A single verb can stand as an entire sentence in Old Irish, in which case emphatic particles such as -sa and -se are affixed to the end of the verb.

References

External links

An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language MacBain, Alexander Gairm Publications, 1982
Old Irish dictionary

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