Old Irish, also called Old Gaelic (; ; ; or ), is the oldest form of the Goidelic/Gaelic language for which there are extensive written texts. It was used from 600 to 900. The main 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 written at an earlier time. Old Irish is the direct ancestor 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,It is difficult to know for sure, given how little Primitive Irish is attested and the limitations of the Ogham alphabet used to write it. 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.
Sources Relatively little survives in the way of strictly contemporary sources. They are represented mainly by shorter or longer glosses on the margins or between the lines of religious Latin manuscripts, most of them preserved in monasteries in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France and Austria, 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.
The earliest Old Irish passages may be the transcripts found in the Cambrai Homily, which is thought to belong to the early 8th century. The Book of Armagh contains texts from the early 9th 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 the abbey of 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, such as the 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 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. 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 are the broad lenis equivalents of broad fortis ; likewise for the slender (palatalised) equivalents. (However, most sounds actually derive historically from , since was relatively rare in Old Irish, being a recent import from other languages such as Latin.)
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" ! colspan="2" | ! Labial ! Dental ! Alveolar ! Velar ! Glottal |- ! rowspan="2" | Nasal ! | | colspan="2" |
! | | colspan="2" |
! rowspan="2" | Plosive ! | | colspan="2" |
! | | colspan="2" |
! rowspan="2" | Fricative !
!
! rowspan="2" | Nasalized fricative !
!
! rowspan="2" | Approximant ! | | colspan="2" |
! | | colspan="2" |
! rowspan="2" | Lateral ! | | colspan="2"|
! | | colspan="2" |
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. (This is much like the situation in Old English but different from Ancient Greek whose shorter and longer diphthongs were bimoraic and trimoraic, respectively: vs. .) 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:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" ! ! colspan="2" | Monophthongs ! colspan="2" | Diphthongs |- !Close
!Mid
| 1 |- !Open | colspan="2" align="center" | , (?) | colspan="2" align="center" |
1The short diphthong likely existed very early in the Old Irish period, but merged with later on and in many instances was replaced with due to paradigmatic levelling. It is attested once in the phrase by the prima manus of the Würzburg Glosses.
arose from the u-infection of stressed by a that preceded a palatalized consonant. This vowel faced much inconsistency in spelling, often detectable by a word containing it being variably spelled with across attestations. "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 (from Proto-Celtic *ɸare).Stifter, David (1998). "Old Irish ²fén 'bog'?" Die Sprache 40(2), pp. 226-228.Qiu, Fangzhe (2019). "Old Irish aue 'descendant' and its descendants". Indogermanische Forschungen 124(1), pp. 343–374
Archaic Old Irish (before about 750) had the following inventory of long vowels:
{|class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" ! ! colspan="2" | Monophthongs ! colspan="2" | Diphthongs |- ! Close
! Mid | 1 | , (?)2 | | , ()3 |- ! Open | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | 3
1Both and were normally written but must have been pronounced differently because they have different origins and distinct outcomes in later Old Irish. stems from Proto-Celtic *ē (< PIE *ei), or from ē in words borrowed from Latin. 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 was higher than . Perhaps was while was . They are clearly distinguished in later Old Irish, in which becomes (but before a palatal consonant). becomes in all circumstances. Furthermore, is subject to u-affection, becoming or , while is not.
2A similar distinction may have existed between and , both written , and stemming respectively from former diphthongs (*eu, *au, *ou) and from compensatory lengthening. However, in later Old Irish both sounds appear usually as , sometimes as , 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 (700 or earlier); afterwards it merged into . Neither sound occurred before another consonant, and both sounds became in later Old Irish (often or before another vowel). The late does not develop into , suggesting that > postdated > .
Later Old Irish had the following inventory of long vowels:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" ! ! colspan="2" | Monophthongs ! colspan="2" | Diphthongs |- ! Close
! Mid
| 1 |- ! Open | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" |
1Early Old Irish and merged in later Old Irish. It is unclear what the resulting sound was, as scribes continued to use both and 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 (at the very end of a word) after both broad and slender consonants. The front vowels and are often spelled and after broad consonants, which might indicate a retracted pronunciation here, perhaps something like and . All ten possibilities are shown in the following examples:
{| class="wikitable" |- ! Old Irish ! Pronunciation ! English ! Annotations
| kill | 1 sg. subj.
| leave | 1 sg. subj.
| () | kill | 2 sg. subj.
| leave | 2 sg. subj.
| (?) | kill | 2 sg. indic.
| leave | 2 sg. indic.
| eye | gen.
| door | gen.
| kill | 1 sg. indic.
| leave | 1 sg. indic.