750
AN GAODHAL.
This may not seem so successful as
pearsa at first sight. The genitive
singular tighearna could arise from the
form given above, and, in Modern Irish, it should
arise, because double letters are not
admitted. The presence of the dh in
the plural in many of these nouns is quite a mod¬
ern expedient. It has no earthly use in the nom¬
native and genitive, and the spoken language, un¬
fortunately, can tell us nothing of the dative,
judging however from such old forms
cridibh, (croidhe,) aidchib (oidhche) &c., we
think even if the dative plural had survived, that
the common sense of the people would have kept
them from the blunders of short sighted grammar¬
ians.
Though we cannot state here, as absolutely as we
did in the other cases, that the fourth declension is
the same as the third, for in reality, the fourth dec¬
lension is composed of two great classes, as I
shall show you later on, still we can assert that there
is not sufficient reason for disjoining nouns like
tighearna, from nouns like slanuightheoir,
and, therefore, that the fourth declension, like the
second and fifth, can hardly stand on its own merit
but must lean on something else for support.
We have now examined four of the five declen¬
sions, and we find them overlapping one another in
the most extraordinary manner. We find the fifth
hardly differing from the second, part of the sec¬
ond invading part of the third, which part of the
third blends by imperceptible gradations into the
fourth. Here I would put you on your guard a¬
gainst a possible misconception. When I said that
the fifth declension possessed no case termination
distinct from the second, or that the a
of clear would become the e of peiste,
or that tighearna could be declined ac¬
cording to slanuightheoir, I did not mean
that, really, pearsa was formerly de¬
clined like cos is now, or that the old
form of the tighearna declension was
like the modern slanuightheoir declen¬
sion; but I meant this that taking
the modern forms of peist and cleas
and pearsa and slanuightheoir, as we get
them in Bourke and Joyce, they are so slightly
different that they unmistakably point to the one
principle of declension — to one case termination
which phonetic rules have modified into the forms
we have now. You know what retarded the progress
of philology for a long time was the idea of the
filiation of languages * — that it was only when the
the possibility of parallel descent from a common
ancestor was recognized, that the science began
really to make headway. So in declension, do not
get the idea that the fifth declension is the daught¬
er of the second, or the fourth of the third; but
remember that second, third, fourth and fifth may
be all the daughters of a common parent. What
I have been trying to do, is, to show first, that the
declensions are related, second, that the termina¬
tions which the grammarians rely on as distinctive,
are by no means so, and, thirdly, that the divisions
as a present constituted, are not exclusive, that
is to say, that, so far from being real divisions, they
melt into one another, and therefore that for four
of the classes, at all events, a new distribution
seems to be necessary.
4. But, let us go a step further, and see if the
broad class of the second and all the first declen¬
sion have any claim to peculiar principle of declen¬
sion. As I mentioned above, the plural of the
broad feminines is the same as that of the cleas type
and if we turn to Canon Bourke §66, we shall find
that liquid nouns of the first declension also have
this a- termination, e.g., leabhara, mea¬
cna and even dorusa and geasa; but
what is more suggestive is, that the vocative plu¬
ral of all the first declension nouns
ends in a; but in every one of the ot¬
her declensions the vocative plural is
the same as the nominative plurals,
therefore, putting this fact with the oc¬
currence of a as a variant of attenu¬
ation. We would be inclined to suspect that per¬
haps after all, attenuation and termination are both
results of the one cause. But what is this attenu¬
ation? I will just give you one instance in Mod¬
ern Irish which may throw some light on it. The
past tense of the substantive verb is
raibh. All Irish grammarians are a¬
greed that this stands for ro bhi. The
i- termination dropped off but it left
its mark behind and that mark is — attenuation.
Attenuation may then be caused by the loss of a
certain vowel termination, therefore it is possible
that the attenuation of the genitive and nomina¬
tive pl. of the first declension and the dative of the
broad second could be produced by the loss of a
vowel termination. To prove more, or to prove it
satisfactorily I do not think Modern Irish is capa¬
ble. It has shown however that there is some rea¬
son to suspect that down under the varying termina¬
ons of the declensions, there is some one cause bind¬
ing all together. It has made evident that the
slightest acquaintance with the subject would sug¬
gest, that the present arrangement is not the true
one, and, as it behoves all earnest searches after
truth, we must pursue our investigations further,
consulting whatever other materials may be likely
to aid us in our search. As I hinted before, these
materials are to be found in the study of the Old
and Middle forms of the language, and in the con¬
clusions of comparative philology. In my next lec¬
ture, then, we shall see what have the old MS to
show in the way of declension, and what have the
sister languages to tell us of this knotty subject,
but before concluding this one I would lay special
emphasis on this great principle which will guide
us in our search. Language, as I told you, is the
growth of time and bears on it the marks of its
growth. The laws however of this growth can only
be derived from close observation of the growth
itself. But the growth of the word in simple terms is
the various forms the word bears in the different
period of our literature and, it is only when we
have gathered together a vast amount of these forms
that we can at all venture to pronounce on the law
of which they are the results. Many of them in¬
* Lectures on Science and Revealed Religion —
Wiseman.
