Talk:Old Irish language

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The page as it exists now is inaccurate; Old Irish is no longer spoken - Old Irish is the common ancestor of Irish and Scots gaelic, but the language in use in Ireland today is most definitly "New Irish". -- Jim Regan 01:05, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Plus: the article is superfluous, as it has the same subject as the Irish language page, which is more complete.Erwin 10:08, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Drastically different

"Old Irish possesses much more inflection than its descendants and also employs drastically different phonetic and grammatical structures"

Yes, it is more inflectional; it depends on what you mean by 'drastically different' -both languages might still recognise each other if they met on the street, even if the modern one is 'simpler'.

However, I cannot agree with the idea of "drastically different phonetic structures". I bet natives speakers and those who can pronounce Irish, would be within an hour able to speak with the same blas as OI. In that area, it has (for older speakers, anyway) seen the least change. Apart from the dental fricatives (there were 4), one can find all other phones (/R'/ included, but that is not to say it is the same /R'/ as 1200 years ago). Given that the phonetic table only has meaning if one places phones in their appropriate boxes, and the modern langauge uses the same sounds, (apart from dental fricatives, and some alveolar r's and gemminated consonants, all of which survived into the 20th century in Donegal irish, altho the dental fricatives were in sandhi only), how can one make this spurious claim? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.93.5.45 (talk • contribs) 16:30, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't notice this comment earlier! I agree that "drastically different" is an overstatement and have rephrased it. I do think the modern languages are phonologically much simpler than Old Irish, more in terms of overall phonotactics and syllable structure than in terms of individual phonemes. User:Angr 13:53, 6 July 2006 (UTC)