Old Irish


Old Irish[], sometimes called Old Gaelic, is the oldest form of the Goidelic languages for which extensive written texts are extant. It was used from 600 to 900. The primary contemporary texts are dated 700–850; by 900 the language had already transitioned into early Middle Irish. Some Old Irish texts date from the 10th century, although these are presumably copies of texts composed at an earlier time period. Old Irish is thus forebear to Modern Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic.
Old Irish is known for having a particularly complex system of morphology and especially of allomorphy as well as a complex sound system involving grammatically significant consonant mutations to the initial consonant of a word. Apparently, neither characteristic was present in the preceding Primitive Irish period, though initial mutations likely existed in a non-grammaticalized form in the prehistoric era. Much of the complex allomorphy was subsequently lost, but the sound system has been maintained with little change in the modern languages.
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 such as Rudolf Thurneysen and Osborn Bergin.

Notable characteristics

Notable characteristics of Old Irish compared with other old Indo-European languages, are:
Old Irish also preserves most aspects of the complicated Proto-Indo-European system of morphology. Nouns and adjectives are declined in three genders ; three numbers ; and five cases. Most PIE noun stem classes are maintained. Most of the complexities of PIE verbal conjugation are also maintained, and there are new complexities introduced by various sound changes.

Classification

Old Irish was the only member of the Goidelic/Gaelic branch of the Celtic languages, which is, in turn, a subfamily of the wider Indo-European language family that also includes the Slavonic, Italic/Romance, Indo-Aryan and Germanic subfamilies, along with several others. Old Irish is the ancestor of all modern Goidelic languages: Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx.
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. The inscriptions date from about the 4th to the 6th centuries. Primitive Irish appears to have been very close to Common Celtic, the ancestor of all Celtic languages, and it had a lot of the characteristics of other archaic Indo-European languages.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Old Irish is shown in the chart [|below]. The complexity of Old Irish phonology is from a four-way split of phonemes inherited from Primitive Irish, with both a fortis–lenis and a "broad–slender" distinction arising from historical changes. The sounds are the broad lenis equivalents of broad fortis ; likewise for the slender equivalents.
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 or. The precise articulation of the fortis sonorants is unknown, but they were probably longer, tenser and generally more strongly articulated than their lenis counterparts, as in the Modern Irish and Scottish dialects that still possess a four-way distinction in the coronal nasals and laterals. and may have been pronounced and respectively. The difference between and may have been that the former were trills while the latter were flaps. and were derived from an original fortis–lenis pair.

Vowels

Old Irish had distinctive vowel length in both monophthongs and diphthongs. Short diphthongs were monomoraic, taking up the same amount of time as short vowels, while long diphthongs were bimoraic, the same as long vowels. The inventory of Old Irish long vowels changed significantly over the Old Irish period, but the short vowels changed much less.
The following short vowels existed:
1The short diphthong may have existed very early in the Old Irish period/but not later on.
Archaic Old Irish had the following inventory of long vowels:
1Both and were normally written é but must have been pronounced differently because they have different origins and distinct outcomes in later Old Irish. stems from Proto-Celtic *ē, or from ē in words borrowed from Latin. generally stems from compensatory lengthening of short *e because of loss of the following consonant or a directly following vowel in hiatus. It is generally thought that was higher than. Perhaps was while was. They are clearly distinguished in later Old Irish, in which becomes ía. becomes é in all circumstances. Furthermore, is subject to u-affection, becoming éu or íu, while is not.
2A similar distinction may have existed between and, both written ó, and stemming respectively from former diphthongs and from compensatory lengthening. However, in later Old Irish both sounds appear usually as úa, sometimes as ó, and it is unclear whether existed as a separate sound any time in the Old Irish period.
3 existed only in early archaic Old Irish ; afterwards it merged into. Neither sound occurred before another consonant, and both sounds became ó in later Old Irish. The late ó does not develop into úa, suggesting that áu > ó postdated ó > úa.
Later Old Irish had the following inventory of long vowels:
1Early Old Irish and merged in later Old Irish. It is unclear what the resulting sound was, as scribes continued to use both aí and oí to indicate the merged sound. The choice of in the table above is somewhat arbitrary.
The distribution of short vowels in unstressed syllables is a little complicated. All short vowels may appear in absolutely final position 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:
The distribution of short vowels in unstressed syllables, other than when absolutely final, was quite restricted. It is usually thought that there were only two allowed phonemes: and . The phoneme tended to occur when the following syllable contained an *ū in Proto-Celtic, or after a broad labial. The phoneme occurred in other circumstances. The occurrence of the two phonemes was generally unrelated to the nature of the corresponding Proto-Celtic vowel, which could be any monophthong: long or short.
Long vowels also occur in unstressed syllables. However, they rarely reflect Proto-Celtic long vowels, which were shortened prior to the deletion of inner syllables. Rather, they originate in one of the following ways:
Stress is generally on the first syllable of a word. However, in verbs it occurs on the second syllable when the first syllable is a clitic. In such cases, the unstressed prefix is indicated in grammatical works with a following centre dot.

Orthography

As with most :Category:Medieval languages|medieval languages, the orthography of Old Irish is not fixed, so the following statements are to be taken as generalisations only. Individual manuscripts may vary greatly from these guidelines.
The Old Irish alphabet consists of the following eighteen letters of the Latin alphabet:
in addition to the five long vowels, shown by an acute accent :
the lenited consonants denoted with a superdot :
and the eclipsis consonants also denoted with a superdot:
Old Irish digraphs include the lenition consonants:
the eclipsis consonants:
the geminatives:
and the diphthongs:
The following table indicates the broad pronunciation of various consonant letters in various environments:
When the consonants b, d, g are eclipsed by the preceding word, their spelling and pronunciation change to: , ,
Generally, geminating a consonant ensures its unmutated sound. While the letter may be voiced at the end of some words, but when it's written double it's always voiceless in regularised texts; however, even final /k/ was often written "cc", as in bec / becc "small, little".
In later Irish manuscripts, lenited f and s are denoted with the letter h,, instead of using a superdot,.
When initial s stemmed from Primitive Irish *sw-, its lenited version is .
The slender variants of the 13 consonants are denoted with marking the letter. They occur in the following environments:
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 or if they need to be emphasised. On the other hand, words that begin with the sound are usually written without it: a ór "her gold". If the sound and the spelling co-occur, it is by coincidence, as ní hed "it is not".

Stops following vowels

The voiceless stops of Old Irish are c, p, t. They contrast with the voiced stops g, b, d. Additionally, the letter m can behave similarly to a stop following vowels. These seven consonants often mutate when not in the word-initial position.
In non-initial positions, the single-letter voiceless stops c, p, and t become the voiced stops,, and respectively unless they are written double. Ambiguity in these letters' pronunciations arises when a single consonant follows an l, n, or r. The lenited stops ch, ph, and th become,, and respectively.
The voiced stops g, b, and d become fricative,, and, respectively—identical sounds to their word-initial lenitions.
In non-initial positions, the letter m usually becomes the nasal fricative, but in some cases it becomes a nasal stop, denoted as. In cases in which it becomes a stop, m is often written double to avoid ambiguity.

Stops following other consonants

Ambiguity arises in the pronunciation of the stop consonants when they follow l, n, or r:
After m, the letter b is naturally a stop. After d, l, r, the letter b is fricative :
After n or r, the letter d is a stop :
After n, l, or r, the letter g is usually a stop, but it becomes a fricative in a few words:

The consonants ''l, n, r''

The letters l, n, r are generally written double when they indicate tense sonorants and single when they indicate lax sonorants. Originally, it reflected an actual difference between single and geminate consonants, as tense sonorants in many positions developed from geminates. As the gemination was lost, the use of written double consonants was repurposed to indicate tense sonorants. Doubly written consonants of this sort do not occur in positions where tense sonorants developed from non-geminated Proto-Celtic sonorants.
Geminate consonants appear to have existed since the beginning of the Old Irish period, but they were simplified by the end, as is generally reflected by the spelling. Although, ll, mm, nn, rr were eventually repurposed to indicate nonlenited variants of those sounds in certain positions.

Vowels

Written vowels a, ai, e, i in poststressed syllables all seem to represent phonemic. The particular vowel that appears is determined by the quality of the surrounding consonants and has no relation to the etymological vowel quality:
It seems likely that spelling variations reflected allophonic variations in the pronunciation of.

History

Old Irish was affected by a series of phonological changes that radically altered its appearance compared with Proto-Celtic and older Celtic languages. The changes were such that Irish was not recognized as Indo-European at all for much of the 19th century. The changes must have happened quite rapidly, perhaps in only one or two hundred years around 500–600, because almost none of the changes are visible in Primitive Irish, and all of them are already complete in archaic Old Irish. A capsule summary of the most important changes is :
  1. Syllable-final n assimilated to the following phoneme, even across word boundaries in the case of syntactically connected words.
  2. * Voiceless stops became voiced: mp nt nk >.
  3. * Voiced stops became prenasalised. They were reduced to simple nasals during the Old Irish period.
  4. * Before a vowel, was attached to the beginning of the syllable.
  5. Lenition of all single consonants between vowels. That applied across word boundaries in the case of syntactically connected words.
  6. * Stops became fricatives.
  7. * s became .
  8. * w was eventually lost.
  9. * m became a nasalised continuant.
  10. * l n r remained, but the non-lenited variants were strengthened to .
  11. Extensive umlaut of short vowels, which were raised or lowered to agree with the height of following Proto-Celtic vowels. Similarly, rounding of a to or often occurred adjacent to labial consonants.
  12. Palatalization of all consonants before front vowels.
  13. Loss of part or all of final syllables.
  14. Loss of most interior vowels.
They led to the following effects:
The following are some examples of changes between Primitive Irish and Old Irish.

Allomorphy

These various changes, especially syncope, produced quite complex allomorphy, because the addition of prefixes or various pre-verbal particles in Proto-Celtic changed the syllable containing the stress: According to the Celtic variant of Wackernagel's law, the stress fell on the second syllable of the verbal complex, including any prefixes and clitics. By the Old Irish period, most of this allomorphy still remained, although it was rapidly eliminated beginning in the Middle Irish period.
Among the most striking changes are in prefixed verbs with or without pre-verbal particles. With a single prefix and without a proclitic, stress falls on the verbal root, which assumes the deuterotonic form. With a prefix and also with a proclitic, stress falls on the prefix, and the verb assumes the prototonic form. Rather extreme allomorphic differences can result:
The following table shows how these forms might have been derived:
The most extreme allomorphy of all came from the third person singular of the s-subjunctive because an athematic person marker -t was used, added directly onto the verbal stem. That led to a complex word-final cluster, which was deleted entirely. In the prototonic form, the root was unstressed and thus the root vowel was also deleted, leaving only the first consonant:

Syncope in detail

In more detail, syncope of final and intervocalic syllables involved the following steps :
All five Proto-Celtic short vowels survived into Primitive Irish more or less unchanged in stressed syllables.
However, during the runup to Old Irish, several mutations take place. Former vowels are modified in various ways depending on the following vowels. The mutations are known in Celtic literature as affections or infections such as these, the most important ones:
  1. i-affection: Short e and o are raised to i and u when the following syllable contains a high vowel. It does not happen when the vowels are separated by certain consonant groups.
  2. a-affection: Short i and u are lowered to e and o when the following syllable contains a non-high back vowel.
  3. u-affection: Short a, e, i are broken to short diphthongs au, eu, iu when the following syllable contains a u or *ū that was later lost. It is assumed that at the point the change operated, u-vowels that were later lost were short u while those that remain were long ū. The change operates after i-affection so original e may end up as iu.
Nominal examples :
Verbal paradigm example:
The result of i-affection and a-affection is that it is often impossible to distinguish whether the root vowel was originally e or i. However, note the cases of nert vs. fiurt above for which i-affection, but not a-affection, was blocked by an intervening rt.

Proto-Celtic long vowels and diphthongs

Proto-Celtic long vowels and diphthongs develop in stressed syllables as follows:
The Old Irish diphthongs úi, éu, íu stem from earlier sequences of short vowels separated by *w, e.g. drúid- "druid" < dru-wid- "tree-knower".
Most instances of é and ó in nonarchaic Old Irish are due to compensatory lengthening of short vowels before lost consonants or to the merging of two short vowels in hiatus: cét ‘hundred’ < Proto-Celtic kantom < PIE kṃtóm.

PIE consonants

Overview

See Proto-Celtic for various changes that occurred in all the Celtic languages, but these are the most important:
From Proto-Celtic to Old Irish, the most important changes are these:
Old Irish preserves, intact, most initial clusters unlike many other Indo-European languages.
Preserved initial clusters:
Modified initial clusters:
Many intervocalic clusters are reduced, becoming either a geminate consonant or a simple consonant with compensatory lengthening of the previous vowel. During the Old Irish period, geminates are reduced to simple consonants, occurring earliest when adjacent to a consonant. By the end of the Old Irish period, written ll mm nn rr are repurposed to indicate the non-lenited sounds when occurring after a vowel and not before a consonant.
Cluster reduction involving n:
Cluster reduction involving s z:
Lenited stops x *ɣ *θ *ð generally disappear before sonorants r l n m, with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. Many examples occur in reduplicated preterites or words with consonant-final prefixes :
However, *θr, *βr, *βl survive: críathraid "he perforates" < PCelt krētrāti-s; gabur "goat" < PCelt gabros ; mebul "shame".

Grammar

Old Irish is a fusional, nominative-accusative, and VSO language.
Nouns decline for 5 cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, prepositional, vocative; 3 genders: masculine, feminine, neuter; 3 numbers: singular, dual, plural. Adjectives agree with nouns in case, gender, and number. The prepositional case is called the dative by convention.
Verbs conjugate for 3 tenses: past, present, future; 3 aspects: simple, perfective, imperfective; 4 moods: indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative; 2 voices: active, and passive; independent, and dependent forms; and simple, and complex forms. Verbs display tense, aspect, mood, voice, and sometimes portmanteau forms through suffixes, or stem vowel changes for the former four. Proclitics form a verbal complex with the core verb, and the verbal complex is often preceded by preverbal particles such as ní, in, ro. Direct object personal pronouns are infixed between the preverb and the verbal stem. Verbs agree with their subject in person and number. A single verb can stand as an entire sentence. Emphatic particles such as -sa and -se are affixed to the end of the verb.
Prepositions inflect for person and number, and different prepositions govern different cases, sometimes depending on the semantics intended.