Old Irish

[Jim Rader]

Are you either of you even halfway serious?  The transition between
Old Irish and Middle Irish and between Middle Irish and Early Modern
Irish is abundantly, if at times confusingly documented, because so
many late 7th-9th-century texts were transmitted in much later copies, and
various strata of the language are readily apparent.  The stages in
the breakdown of the Old Irish verbal system, which is the principal
gulf dividing Old Irish from Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic, are
not hard to describe.  The transition from Old to Modern Irish is far
better documented than, say, the transition from Latin to Old French.

Recall that the canonical Old Irish texts, i.e., those whose
manuscripts date from before ca. 900, are principally glosses and
commentaries in the margins of Latin manuscripts.  Though the source
of these commentaries is a complex issue about which I have no
expertise, there is unquestionably an extemporaneous quality to them;
they are not some kind of literary exercise and there is little doubt
they reflect the speech of the scribes.  Very likely this speech
had undergone some dialect leveling, because members of monastic
communities were drawn from different areas of Ireland, but the idea that
this language is either completely artificial or the vestige of some
foreign elite is not plausible.

The complexity of Old Irish has been exaggerated because the great
majority of people who study it have European languages as their sole
point of comparison.  True, there is a remarkable degree of opacity
in certain morphological relationships, as between prototonic and
deuterotonic verb forms, for example, but I'm sure parallels could be
found in other languages with lots of morphology that have undergone
significant phonological change.  There is a remarkable degree of
opacity in the verbal paradigms of Arikara (a Caddoan language of the
U.S. Great Plains), not to mention the possessed forms of kinship terms
and others areas of its morphology.  But I don't think anyone has
ever proposed that Arikara was altered by its speakers to make it as
complex as possible.

Jim Rader


> Rick Mc Callister writes:

>>       I throw out some possibilities
>>       Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was NOT the direct ancestor
>>  of Gaelic? i.e that it held the same relationship to Gaeilge and Gaidhlig
>>  that Classical Latin held to Romance?
>>       Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was only a literary language?
>>       Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was the language of an elite
>>  of Briton or Gaulish origin and did not represent the speech of the
>>  majority?

> Don't know.  But a philologist colleague did suggest to me once, years
> ago, that literary Old Irish might have been to a significant extent an
> artificial creation of the scribes, who delighted in introducing and
> maintaining every possible complication, producing as a result something
> which did not represent ordinary speech at any time in history.

> Larry Trask