Old Irish phonology (original) (raw)

Sound change and typological shift: Initial mutation in Celtic

Linguistic Reconstruction and Typology

In the course of the development of Celtic a system of phonetic sandhi phenomena were functionalized and have come to be central to the morphology of all the present-day Celtic languages. These phenomena are seen here in direct relation to the loss of inherited inflectional endings and as an attempt to compensate for the attrition of the morphology. The result has been a typological realignment which has been maintained despite later changes which shifted the system somewhat. By examining a number of parallel cases the position of the Celtic languages, particularly Irish, is put into perspective.

The Phonology of Celtic

Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. An International Handbook. Edited by Jared S. Klein, Brian Joseph, Matthias Fritz [= Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikations-wissenschaft 41/2], Berlin – New York: Walter de Gruyter , 2017

Celtic initial consonant mutations - nghath and bhfuil?

2008

The Insular Celtic languages, such as Irish and Welsh, distinctively feature a morphophonemic process known as initial consonant mutation. Essentially the initial sound of a word changes due to certain grammatical contexts. Thus the word for ‘car’ may appear as carr, charr and gcarr in Irish and as car, gar, char and nghar in Welsh. Originally these mutations result from assimilatory phonological processes which have become grammaticalized and can convey morphological, semantic and syntactic information. This paper looks at the primary mutations in Irish and Welsh, showing the phonological changes involved and exemplifying their basic triggers with forms from the modern languages. Then it explores various topics related to initial consonant mutations including their historical development and impact on the grammatical structure of the Celtic languages. This examination helps to clarify the existence and operations of the initial mutations and displays how small sound changes can hav...

Prosody and the Old Celtic Verbal Complex

A. ANOMALOUS SANOHI GEMINATION AND THE PROTO-CELTIC ACCENT §l. Most if not all of the so-called phonological ' irregularities' associated with the early Neo-Celtic verbal complex can be understood as regular effects of the position and nature of the accent in Proto-Celtic, itself a development of the Indo-European situation. The theory presented in this article rests upon two key principles: (i) that Proto-Celtic had regular external sandhi patterns (such as phonetic gemination following a vowel across juncture) prevailing between stressed words and following enclitics which differed drastically from the behaviour between stressed words, between a proclitic and a stressed word, or between two enclitics in synenclisis; (ii) that an Old Celtic atonic word ending in a short front vowel tended to lose that vowel while the tonic form of the same word (under certain conditions) tended to retain it, e.g. MW dy < *to(u) v. teu < *tbwe or *Iewe.

Some Aspects of the Historical Development of English Consonant Phonemes

Transactions of the Philological Society, 1991

1. I. The main facts of Middle English phonology are well charted in the standard 'grammars' (Luick 191 4-40, Jordan 1974, Dobson 1968). Writing from the standpoint of traditional philologists I have attempted to accommodate their ideas to a structural approach as appropriate. The purpose of this article is to survey briefly the system of consonant phonemes inherited from Old English, to indicate their use in initial, various medial, and final positions, and to discuss and try to clarify in certain respects the development of some of them in Middle English and beyond. Attention will be drawn to the effects of (a) certain Middle English sound changes, @)the order of these sound changes varying according to dialect, and (c) the introduction of loan-words. 1.2. In Old English there were five plosive consonant phonemes, three voiceless, /p t k/, and two voiced, /b d/; two affricates, one voiceless, /g/, and one voiced, /@/; two nasals, /m/ and /n/; two liquids, /I/ and /rk six fricatives, /f 0 sJh y/, of which /h/ was voiceless and /y/ voiced; and two semi-vowels, /j/ and /w/ (see Kuhn 1970). Instances of their occurrence in various positions are given in Table 1, including a separate column for geminates, sometimes referred to as long consonants. For the present purposes it is safe to assume that geminates survived only in intervocalic position or between a vowel and a liquid (Severs-Brunner 19655231; also, for geminate /r/, Kuhn 1970: §6.22). They are treated as geminates because of the probability that they straddle a syllable boundary. In Old English poetry the metre requires habban 'to have' to consist of two 'long' syllables, as must be the case if the geminate straddles the syllable boundary. If the first syllable in

Neo-Brittonic Spirants from Old Celtic Geminates

The prese nt article builds upon the argumentation presented in my 'Prosody and the Old Celtic verbal complex ' , Eriu 38 (1987), 143-76. In that paper , the so-called OCelt. geminates-as occurred internally within a stressed word or other accentual unit (e.g. stressed word + enclitic)-were treated as double consonants on the phonetic level, [-t.t-, -k.k-], etc. The symbol [.] is used for a syllable boundary: the geminate belonged to both flanking syllables, arresting the preceding syllable and releasing the following. A syllable preceding a geminate was thus heavy (i.e. closed) even if its nucleus was a short vowel. Consequently, a short vowel followed by a geminate was capable of bearing what I termed a monosyllabic stress accent. 1 Following a moric model , one would say that a geminate added one mora to the preceding syllable .

A Historical Phonology of English

2013

A HISTORICAL PHONOLOGY OF ENGLISH 3.2 The Indo-European family of languages 3.3 The Germanic branch of Indo-European 3.4 Some pre-Old English segmental and prosodic changes 3.4.1 Grimm's Law, or the First Germanic Consonant Shift 3.4.2 Some IE vowel changes in Germanic 3.4.3 Early prosodic changes: stress and syllable weight in Germanic 3.4.4 Lengthening of fi nal vowels in stressed monosyllables 3.4.5 West Germanic (Consonant) Gemination (WGG)