AN GAOḊAL.
715
This Nasal eclipsis is the only kind known in
Oid and Middle Irish. In Scotch Gael¬
ic the n comes back in certain cases
but the sound of the initial consonant is generally
preserved by the elision of the nasal.
§2. FLATTENING.
We have now to consider how it is that in Mod¬
ern Irish, letters, thin in Middle Irish, have be¬
come flat. This broadening or flattening is char¬
acteristic of our modern tongue, and is not found in
the Scottish dialect. From the fact that this change
takes place in exactly the same circumstances as the
nasal eclipsis explained above, we would naturally
expect to find them some way connected. We
stated that the Middle Irish na ceart
and the Modern Irish na g-ceart stand
for na nceart let us see if changes
in other words throw light on this.
By comparison with the sister languages of the
Irish, we know that many Irish words have lost a
nasal from the body of the word, thus the Old Irish
bréc, is connected with the Sanskrit
bhramca: carat genitive of cara, oac
a youth, etc. all had an n thus, brenc
carant oanc and so on. Now what do
we find in Modern Irish for these words
bréc-breug, carat-carad, oac-óg, show¬
ing that the after-effect of the lost n
was to broaden the c, d and g. Thus
I think you will have no difficulty in granting that
the following formula are at least probable :
n-c equal
cc equal
g-c,
n-f "
ff "
ḃ-f,
n-p "
pp "
b-p.
n-t "
tt "
d-t.
n-s "
ss "
s.
The reason I left out s and the rea¬
son that will change the probability al¬
most into certainty is the following
fact from Canon Bourke's grammar p.
40, "There is a form of eclipsis adopted
not uncommonly of doubling the con¬
sonants c, f, p, t, thus — --- ar ccapal,
[ar g-capal,] ḃur ffile etc." Thus you
have the assimilation hinted at above,
borne out by the sunconsciousness of
the writers of the language. Not stat¬
ing expressly that the g and the ḃ were
due to the assimilation of n, but plainly
pointing it out by the methods they used to express
such assimilation and its results.
You may remark that in the above table I inclu¬
ded p because we are now speaking of
the modern language and this letter is pretty fre¬
quent in its borrowed words, and has followed
the analogy of other sharp consonants.
§3 T-ECLIPSES,
The third and last division we made of the table
of Eclipsis remains still to be considered. This is
the case of s. I remember well when
I first began Irish grammar, this s
nearly made me turn back. It was not indeed that
it was so very hard to master the rules concerning
it, but because I happed somewhere to stumble
across the assertion that the Irish Bards called it
the queen of consonants. I thought that, if that
was all the respect they had for their rules that
they call the greatest rebel and law-breaker, the
queen, the said rules could not be much depended
on. But luckily for Irish as well as for all other
languages, it is not the grammarians who have the
making of the rules but the people who speak the
language and the scholars who write it, and there
is little fear of the people at least violating to any
great extent the philology of their own tongue.
Before explaining the appearance of
t I will direct your attention to the
method of denoting aspiration at pres¬
ent used amongst us. It is by the dot
over or h after the aspirated letter. In
Old irish MSS. the dot was only used
for f and s, while for the others h or
the Greek rougn breathing was employ¬
ed. Now you may be surprised to
know what was the use of this dot a-
mongst the Irish scribes. When we
write the wrong letter, we gener¬
ally draw our pen through it to cancel it, the old
writers simply put a dot over it, thus
ṡ and ḟ are blotted out and the words
begin for all intents and purposes, with what we
would call the second letter e. g., ṡuil
would be treated as uil, ḟir as ir, etc.
Now turn to over Rule IX. and you see there
the following statement, “All masculine nouns be¬
ginning with vowels take t prefixed in
the nominative and accusative singular when
the article is expressed." Could this t
have anything to do with the t of t-s?
The fact stated on page 92 that "the
letter s is eclipsed by t, "but only in
nouns influenced by the article," would
seem to point that way. But first let us find out
whence comes the t in the vowel nouns.
For this we have recourse to the an¬
cient language. There we find such
locutions as, ind ḟir, the men, dond ai-
dċi to the night, in t-ara the choriot¬
eer, which prepares us for and proves the assertion
that the stem of the article originally
ended in -nd, which -nd (nt) returns be¬
fore a vowel as e. g. n returns before
búr n-ean. Remembering then what
we said above about ḟ and ṡ that they
are as if they were not we have no difficulty as rec¬
ognizing ind ḟir, in t-ṡuil, and an t-
