amnair

Old Irish

Etymology

From Proto-Celtic *awontīr (compare Welsh ewythr, Breton eontr, Cornish ewnter), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂éwh₂ō (“(maternal) grandfather/uncle”) (compare Middle Irish ó, Latin avus (“grandfather”), dialectal German Awwe (“grandfather”), Ohm (“uncle”)).

Noun

amnair m

1. maternal uncle
   • c. 845, St Gall Glosses on Priscian, published in Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (reprinted 1975, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies), edited and with translations by Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, vol. II, pp. 49–224, Sg. 61^a21

     amnair bráthair máthar glosses auunculus

Inflection

Only the lemma form is attested, but it is likely to have followed the declension pattern of athair and bráthair.

Descendants

• Irish: amhnair, omhnair (obsolete)

Mutation

Old Irish mutation
Radical	Lenition	Nasalization
amnair (pronounced with /h/ in h-prothesis environments)	unchanged	n-amnair
Note: Some of these forms may be hypothetical. Not every possible mutated form of every word actually occurs.

Further reading

• Gregory Toner, Sharon Arbuthnot, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, Dagmar Wodtko, editors (2019), “amnair”, in eDIL: Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language