Old Irish

Old Irish was the Goidelic language in the Middle Ages. People spoke Old Irish in Ireland, before the year 1000 AD.^[1] Old Irish was a Goidelic language, and modern Goidelic languages like Irish and Scots Gaelic came from it.^[2]

Old Irish
᚛ᚃᚘᚇᚓᚂ᚜
Pronunciation	[ˈɸia̯ðel]
Region	Ireland and your colonies in Man, Wales, Scotland, Devon and Cornwall
Era	6th–10th century; evolved into Mid Irish by around the 10th century
Language family	Indo-European Celtic Insular Celtic Old Irish
Writing system	Ogham
Language codes
ISO 639-2	sga
ISO 639-3	sga
Glottolog	oldi1246

History

The western Britain in a satellite photograph by the European Space Agency.

People speaking Insular Celtic languages probably first came to Ireland at the start of the Iron Age, about 500 BC.^[3] By around 500 AD, people in Ireland all had the same Goidelic language and culture.^[4] Speakers of Old Irish began to move to Britain as Britain became weaker.^[5] Other peoples of Britain named these people the Scot.^[6]

Old Irish was the only language in the Goidelic languages until Old Irish split into the modern Goidelic languages of Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx.^[7] These languages are Insular Celtic languages and part of the bigger group of Celtic languages.^[8]

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 /ɸ v θ ð x ɣ h ṽ n l r/ are the broad lenis equivalents of broad fortis /p b t d k ɡ s m N L R/; likewise for the slender (palatalised) equivalents. (However, most /ɸ ɸʲ/ sounds actually derive historically from /w/, since /p/ was relatively rare in Old Irish, being a recent import from other languages such as Latin.) |}

¹The short diphthong ŏu likely existed very early in the Old Irish period, but merged with /u/ later on and in many instances was replaced with /o/ due to paradigmatic levelling. It is attested once in the phrase i routh by the prima manus of the Würzburg Glosses.^[9]

/æ ~ œ/ arose from the u-infection of stressed /a/ by a /u/ that preceded a palatalized consonant. This vowel faced much inconsistency in spelling, often detectable by a word containing it being variably spelled with  au, ai, e, i, or u across attestations.

References

1. Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2015) [2010]. "Old Irish". Oxford Dictionary of English (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780199571123.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-172766-5. Retrieved 2021-03-05.
3. Welch, Robert (2003) [2000]. The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780192800800.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-280080-0.
9. David Greene (1976). "The Diphthongs of Old Irish". Ériu. 27: 26–45. JSTOR 30007667.