Old Irish

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 the ancestor to Modern Irish, Scots 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 enthusiasts.

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.

Pronunciation and Writing

One area where Old Irish is believed to differ greatly from Modern Irish is in pronunciation. Basic consonants in Old Irish are t, p, c (k), d, b, g, th, f, n, m, ng, r, l, and s. These are considered the basic consonants because they are the only ones that can stand independant of any phonetic modification. However, various grammatical and morphological constructions (medial aspiration, lenition, nasalization, palatalization, and gemination) change these sounds to result in many other distinct phonemes which would be far too numerous to document here, especially as no alphabet to date can accurately or fully represent this wide variety of sounds (even IPA falls short in this case), and entire chapters have been written in books about the use of Roman letters in the Old Irish period. Old Irish scribes even appeared to be confused on how to write their language, often giving several different spellings for the exact same word.

Grammar: Sentence Structure

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. Nouns possess four cases (nominative, genitive, accusative a.k.a. objective, and dative), and two numbers – the singular and the plural. A third number, dual, is attested to a limited degree with somewhat distinct forms, though it is almost always preceded by the cardinal dá, meaning "two". 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.

Grammar: Verbs

Verbs stand initially in the sentence (preceded only by some particles 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 a preverb (a sort of verbal clarifier used similarly to the a-, e-, in-, etc. in Latin verbs, though not directly related), 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.

Grammar: Nouns

Grammar: Adjectives

Grammar: Questions and commands