Old Irish

Old Irish is the name given to the oldest form of the Goidelic languages for which extensive written texts are extant. It was used from the 6th to the 10th centuries, by which time it had developed into Middle Irish.

Contemporary Old Irish scholarship is still greatly influenced by the works of a small number of scholars active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, among them Rudolf Thurneysen (1857-1940) and Osborn Bergin (1873-1950). Their books are viewed as required material for any enthusiast of Old Irish even today.

Classification

A still older form of Irish is known as Primitive Irish. Fragments of Primitive Irish, mainly personal names, are known from inscriptions on stone written in the Ogham alphabet. These inscriptions date from about the 4th to the 6th centuries. Primitive Irish is still very close to Common Celtic, the ancestor of all Celtic languages.

Old Irish is the ancestor of Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx (spoken on the Isle of Man). Broadly speaking, the grammar and sound systems of the modern languages are simpler than those of Old Irish.

Sources

Relatively little survives in the way of strictly contemporary sources. These are mainly represented by shorter or longer glosses on the margins or between the lines of religious Latin manuscripts, most of them preserved in monasteries in Switzerland, Germany, France and Italy, having been taken there by early Irish missionaries. Whereas in Ireland, many of the older manuscripts appear to have been worn out through extended and heavy use, their counterparts on the Continent were much less prone to the same risk, because once they ceased to be understood, they were rarely consulted.^[1]

The earliest Old Irish passages may be the transcripts found in the Book of Armagh and the Cambrai Homily, both of which are thought to belong to the early 8th century. Important Continental collections of glosses from the 8th and 9th century include the Würzburg Glosses (mainly) on the Pauline Epistles, the Milan Glosses on a commentary to the Psalms and the St Gall Glosses on Priscian's Grammar. Further examples are found at Karlsruhe (Germany), Paris (France), Milan, Florence and Turin (Italy). A late 9th-century manuscript from Reichenau, now in St. Paul in Carinthia (Austria), contains a spell and four Old Irish poems. The Liber Hymnorum and the Stowe Missal date from about 900 to 1050.

In addition to contemporary witnesses, the vast majority of Old Irish texts are attested in manuscripts of a variety of later dates. Manuscripts of the later Middle Irish period, for instance, such as the Lebor na hUidre and the Book of Leinster, contain texts which are thought to derive from written exemplars in Old Irish now lost and retain enough of their original form to merit classification as Old Irish. The preservation of certain linguistic forms which were current in the Old Irish period may provide reason to assume that an Old Irish original directly or indirectly underlies the transmitted text or texts.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Old Irish is shown in the chart below. /N/, /Nʲ/, /L/, /Lʲ/, /R/, /Rʲ/ represent fortis sonorants whose precise articulation is unknown, but which were probably longer, tenser, and generally more strongly articulated than their lenis counterparts /n/, /nʲ/, /l/, /lʲ/, /r/, /rʲ/. Like Modern Irish, Old Irish exhibits contrasts between "broad" (velarized) and "slender" (palatalized) consonants.

Some details of Old Irish phonetics are not known. /sʲ/ may have been pronounced [ɕ] or [ʃ], as in Modern Irish. /hʲ/ may have been the same sound as /h/ and/or /xʲ/. /Nʲ/ and /Lʲ/ may have been pronounced [ɲ] and [ʎ] respectively. The difference between /R(ʲ)/ and /r(ʲ)/ may have been that the former were trills while the latter were flaps.

Vowels

The inventory of Old Irish monophthongs is:

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 /e/ and /i/ are often spelled ae and ai after broad consonants, which might indicate a retracted pronunciation here, perhaps something like [ɘ] and [ɨ]. All ten possibilities are shown in the following examples:

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 /a/, as in dígal /ˈdʲiːɣal/ "vengeance" (nom.). Between a slender and a broad consonant the vowel is /e/, as in dliged /ˈdʲlʲiɣʲeð/ "law" (nom./acc.). Before a slender consonant the vowel is /i/, as in dígail /ˈdʲiːɣilʲ/ "vengeance" (acc./dat.), and dligid /ˈdʲlʲiɣʲiðʲ/ "law" (gen.). The chief exceptions to this pattern are that /u/ frequently appears when the following syllable contained an *ū in Proto-Celtic (for example, dligud /ˈdʲlʲiɣuð/ "law" (dat.) < PC *dligedū), and that /o/ or /u/ frequently appears after a broad labial (for example, lebor /ˈLʲevor/ "book"; domun /ˈdoṽun/ "world").

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

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 vary 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. The following are long vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú.
• The superdot indicates the lenition of f and s: ḟ is silent, ṡ is pronounced /h/
• 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: ṁ, ṅ.

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):

Although Old Irish has both a sound /h/ 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 /a hoːr/ "her gold". If the sound and the spelling cooccur, it is by coincidence, as ní hed /Nʲiː heð/ "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:

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

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

After n and r, d is a stop

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

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

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

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.)

Syntax

Old Irish follows the typical VSO (verb-subject-object) structure shared by most Celtic languages (even though other orders are possible, especially under Bergin's Law). 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, this covered, as in the modern Gaelic languages, by the verbal noun. Personal pronouns, when used as direct objects, are prefixed to the verb with which they are associated (after other prefxes, and therefore are often referred to as infixes). Prepositions have the same status as the Latin prepositions, including the property of being verb prefixes.

Morphology

Nouns

Old Irish had three genders, namely, masculine, feminine and neuter; three numbers, namely, singular, dual and plural, with the 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 as such has been retained in the modern Gaelic languages); 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 prepositions in origin, compare a-, e-, in-, etc. in Latin verbs), followed by a verb stem, which can be either suffixed for tense, person, mood and aspect (often portmanteau suffixes), or where these can be shown by vowel changes in the stem (e.g. as·beir present "says", as·rubart past "said", as·béra future "will say"). Personal pronouns as direct objects are infixed between the preverb and the verbal stem. Before this core "verb phrase" are placed 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. In an overall sense, the verb structure is agglutinative. 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.

See also

• Early Irish literature
• Dictionary of the Irish Language
• Auraicept na n-Éces
• Goidelic substrate hypothesis

Notes

References

• Green, Antony (1995). Old Irish Verbs and Vocabulary. Somerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press. ISBN 1-57473-003-7. 
• Lehmann, R. P. M.; W. P. Lehmann (1975). An Introduction to Old Irish. New York: Modern Language Association of America. ISBN 0873522893. 
• McCone, Kim (1987). The Early Irish Verb. Maynooth: An Sagart. ISBN 1-870684-00-1. 
• McCone, Kim (2005). A First Old Irish Grammar and Reader. Maynooth: Department of Old and Middle Irish, National University of Ireland. ISBN 0-901519-36-7. 
• O’Connell, Frederick William (1912). A Grammar of Old Irish. Belfast: Mayne, Boyd & Son. http://www.archive.org/details/grammaroldirish00oconuoft. 
• Quin, E. G. (1975). Old-Irish Workbook. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. ISBN 0-901714-08-9. 
• Stifter, David (2006). Sengoidelc: Old Irish for Beginners. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. ISBN 0-8156-3072-7. 
• Strachan, John (1949). Old-Irish Paradigms and Selections from the Old-Irish Glosses. Revised by Osborn Bergin (Fourth ed.). Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. ISBN 0-901714-35-6. http://www.archive.org/details/oldirishparadigm00strauoft. 
• Thurneysen, Rudolf (1993) [1946]. A Grammar of Old Irish. Translated by D. A. Binchy and Osborn Bergin. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. ISBN 1-85500-161-6. 
• Tigges, Wim; Feargal Ó Béarra (2006). An Old Irish Primer. Nijmegen: Stichting Uitgeverij de Keltische Draak. ISBN 90-806863-5-2. 

External links

• An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language MacBain, Alexander Gairm Publications, 1982
• Old Irish dictionary
• Old Irish Online from the University of Texas at Austin.
• eDIL (digital edition of the Dictionary of the Irish Language)

Manx linguistics Primitive Irish · Old Irish · Middle Irish · Manx language