Old Irish, also called Old Gaelic (endonym: Goídelc; Irish: Sean-Ghaeilge; Scottish Gaelic: Seann-Ghàidhlig; Manx: Shenn Yernish or Shenn Ghaelg), is the oldest form of the Goidelic/Gaelic language for which there are extensive written texts. It was used from c. 600 to c. 900. The main contemporary texts are dated c. 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 written at an earlier time. Old Irish is forebear to Early Modern Irish, Manx Gaelic and Scots Gaelic.
Old Irish is known for having a particularly complex system of morphology and especially of allomorphy (more or less unpredictable variations in stems and suffixes in differing circumstances), 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-grammaticalised form in the prehistoric era.
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 (1857–1940) and Osborn Bergin (1873–1950).
Notable characteristics
Notable characteristics of Old Irish compared with other old Indo-European languages, are:
Initial mutations, including lenition, nasalisation and aspiration/gemination.
A complex system of verbal allomorphy.
A system of conjugated prepositions that is unusual in Indo-European languages but common to Celtic languages. There is a great deal of allomorphy here, as well.
Infixed or prefixed object prepositions, which are inserted between the verb stem and its initial prefix(es). If a verb lacks any such prefixes, a dummy prefix is normally added.
Special verbal conjugations are used to signal the beginning of a relative clause.
Old Irish also preserves most aspects of the complicated Proto-Indo-European (PIE) system of morphology. Nouns and adjectives are declined in three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter); three numbers (singular, dual, plural); and five cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, dative and genitive). Most PIE noun stem classes are maintained (o-, yo-, ā-, yā-, i-, u-, r-, n-, s-, and consonant stems). Most of the complexities of PIE verbal conjugation are also maintained, and there are new complexities introduced by various sound changes (see below).
Classification
Old Irish was the only known member of the Goidelic 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" (velarised vs. palatalised) distinction arising from historical changes. The sounds /f v θ ð x ɣ h ṽ n l r/ are the broad lenis equivalents of broad fortis /p b t d k ɡ s m N L R/; likewise for the slender (palatalised) equivalents. (However, most /f fʲ/ sounds actually derive historically from /w/, since /p/ was relatively rare in Old Irish, being a recent import from other languages such as Latin.)
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/ or /xʲ/. The precise articulation of the fortis sonorants /N/, /Nʲ/, /L/, /Lʲ/, /R/, /Rʲ/ is unknown, but they were probably longer, tenser and generally more strongly articulated than their lenis counterparts /n/, /nʲ/, /l/, /lʲ/, /r/, /rʲ/, as in the Modern Irish and Scottish dialects that still possess a four-way distinction in the coronal nasals and laterals. /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. /m(ʲ)/ and /ṽ(ʲ)/ 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. (This is much like the situation in Old English but different from Ancient Greek whose shorter and longer diphthongs were bimoraic and trimoraic, respectively: /ai/ vs. /aːi/.) 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 ŏu likely existed very early in the Old Irish period, but merged with /u/ later on and in many instances was replaced with /o/ due to paradigmatic levelling. It is attested once in the phrase i routh by the prima manus of the Würzburg Glosses.
/æ ~ œ/ arose from the u-infection of stressed /a/ by a /u/ that preceded a palatalized consonant. This vowel faced much inconsistency in spelling, often detectable by a word containing it being variably spelled with ⟨au, ai, e, i, u⟩ across attestations. Tulach "hill, mound" is the most commonly cited example of this vowel, with the spelling of its inflections including tulach itself, telaig, telocho, tilchaib, taulich and tailaig. This special vowel also ran rampant in many words starting with the stressed prefix air- (from Proto-Celtic *ɸare).
Archaic Old Irish (before about 750) had the following inventory of long vowels:
1Both /e₁ː/ and /e₂ː/ were normally written ⟨é⟩ but must have been pronounced differently because they have different origins and distinct outcomes in later Old Irish. /e₁ː/ stems from Proto-Celtic *ē (< PIE *ei), or from ē in words borrowed from Latin. /e₂ː/ generally stems from compensatory lengthening of short *e because of loss of the following consonant (in certain clusters) or a directly following vowel in hiatus. It is generally thought that /e₁ː/ was higher than /e₂ː/. Perhaps /e₁ː/ was [eː] while /e₂ː/ was [ɛː]. They are clearly distinguished in later Old Irish, in which /e₁ː/ becomes ⟨ía⟩ (but ⟨é⟩ before a palatal consonant). /e₂ː/ becomes ⟨é⟩ in all circumstances. Furthermore, /e₂ː/ is subject to u-affection, becoming ⟨éu⟩ or ⟨íu⟩, while /e₁ː/ is not.
2A similar distinction may have existed between /o₁ː/ and /o₂ː/, both written ⟨ó⟩, and stemming respectively from former diphthongs (*eu, *au, *ou) and from compensatory lengthening. However, in later Old Irish both sounds appear usually as ⟨úa⟩, sometimes as ⟨ó⟩, and it is unclear whether /o₂ː/ existed as a separate sound any time in the Old Irish period.
3/ou/ existed only in early archaic Old Irish (c.700 or earlier); afterwards it merged into /au/. Neither sound occurred before another consonant, and both sounds became ⟨ó⟩ in later Old Irish (often ⟨ú⟩ or ⟨u⟩ before another vowel). 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 /ai/ and /oi/ 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 /oi/ 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 (at the very end of a word) 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:
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: /ə/ (written ⟨a, ai, e, i⟩ depending on the quality of surrounding consonants) and /u/ (written ⟨u⟩ or ⟨o⟩). The phoneme /u/ tended to occur when the following syllable contained an *ū in Proto-Celtic (for example, dligud /ˈdʲlʲiɣuð/ "law" (dat.) < PC *dligedū), or after a broad labial (for example, lebor /ˈLʲevur/ "book"; domun /ˈdoṽun/ "world"). The phoneme /ə/ 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 (syncope) of inner syllables. Rather, they originate in one of the following ways:
from the late resolution of a hiatus of two adjacent vowels (usually as a result of loss of *s between vowels);
from compensatory lengthening in response to loss of a consonant (cenél "kindred, gender" < *cenethl; du·air-chér "I have purchased" < *-chechr, preterite of crenaid "buys");
from assimilation of an unstressed vowel to a corresponding long stressed vowel;
from late compounding;
from lengthening of short vowels before unlenited /m, N, L, R/, still in progress in Old Irish (compare erríndem "highest" vs. rind "peak").
Stress
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 (the verbal prefix as- in as·beir /asˈberʲ/ "he says"). In such cases, the unstressed prefix is indicated in grammatical works with a following centre dot (⟨·⟩).
Orthography
As with most 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:
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u,
in addition to the five long vowels, shown by an acute accent (´):
á, é, í, ó, ú,
the lenited consonants denoted with a superdot (◌̇):
ḟ, ṡ,
and the eclipsis consonants also denoted with a superdot:
ṁ, ṅ.
Old Irish digraphs include the lenition consonants:
ch, fh, th, ph, sh,
the eclipsis consonants:
mb, nd, ng; ṁb, ṅd, ṅg,
the geminatives:
bb, cc, ll, mm, nn, pp, rr, tt,
and the diphthongs:
aé/áe/aí/ái, oé/óe/oí/ói,
uí, ía, áu, úa, éu, óu, iu, au, eu,
ai, ei, oi, ui; ái, éi, ói, úi.
The following table indicates the broad pronunciation of various consonant letters in various environments: