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.
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 .
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) |
|---|
| | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | |
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,
euIn 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 deadAfter
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"
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.
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).
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.
*
*
Old Irish literature*
An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language MacBain, Alexander Gairm Publications, 1982
*
Old Irish dictionary
