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  nativename Goídelc
  pronunciation {Link without Title}
  states Ireland
  familycolor Indo-European
  fam1 Indo-European
  fam2 Celtic
  fam3 Insular Celtic
  fam4 Goidelic
  script Latin
  extinct Evolved into Middle Irish about the 10th century


Old Irish is the name given to the oldest form of the Irish Language which can be, more or less, fully reconstructed from extant sources. It dates from the 6th to the 10th Century when it gives way to Middle Irish .

Old Irish first appears in the margins of Latin religious Manuscripts dating as early as the 6th century. A large number of early Irish literary texts, though recorded in manuscripts of the Middle Irish period such as Lebor Na HUidre and the Book Of Leinster , are essentially Old Irish in character.

It should be noted that while Old Irish is the ancestor to Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic , and Manx Gaelic , it is most definitely distinct from these. In general, Old Irish possesses much more inflection than its descendants and also employs drastically different phonetic and grammatical structures.

A great deal of what is known about Old Irish comes from a small number of individuals such as Dr. Rudolf Thurneysen (1857-1940) and Osborn Bergin. Even today, their books are regarded as required material for any Old Irish enthusiast.

Fragments, mainly personal names, of an earlier form of the language (known as Primitive Irish ) are known from inscriptions in the Ogham alphabet in Ireland and western Britain dating as late as the 4th Century .


PHONOLOGY


Consonants

The Consonant inventory of Old Irish is shown in the chart below. represent Fortis Sonorant s whose precise articulation is unknown, but which were probably longer, Tenser , and generally more strongly articulated than their lenis counterparts .

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 and/or . and may have been pronounced and respectively. The difference between and may have been that the former were Trills while the latter were Flaps .


Vowels

The inventory of Old Irish Monophthong s is:

The distribution of short Vowel s in Unstressed Syllable s 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 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 inventory of Old Irish Diphthong s 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 Manuscript s may very 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 Diacritic s with certain letters:

A number of Digraph s 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 Vowel s (''a'', ''o'', ''u'') and slender before Front Vowel s (''e'', ''i''):


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 (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'' "her gold". If the sound and the spelling Cooccur , it is by coincidence, as ''ní hed'' "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 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 .

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 . 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 (present to a limited degree in Modern Irish), the meaning of which Old Irish conveyed with Verbal Noun constructions. Personal pronouns, when used as direct objects, are infixed into the verb with which they are associated. What equate to prepositions in English are generally in the same placement as Old Irish, though a good many with verbal overtones are actually infixed into the verbs themselves.


MORPHOLOGY


Nouns

Old Irish maintained three Genders , namely, masculine, feminine and neuter; three Numbers , namely, Singular , Plural and Dual , with the third number, 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 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 historically of prepositional origin, compare ''a-'', ''e-'', ''in-'', etc. in Latin verbs, though not directly related and verbal prefixes in Germanic languages), followed by a verb stem which bears the bulk of the conjugation. Personal pronouns as direct objects are infixed between the preverb and the verbal stem, along with 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. 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.




REFERENCES