Talk:Primitive Irish

Initial Mutations
I find it hard to believe that Primitive Irish did not have initial mutations, as this is a shared feature amongst all Celtic languages, including those not descended from Primitive Irish. Is it being suggested that they developed in both the Brythonic languages and the Goidelic ones independently? How come it's such a rare feature among Indo-European languages then? I just doesn't seem likely. Also, the sentence affirming that is not referenced, so if it is true could someone please find the source?84.77.111.117 (talk) 16:23, 17 June 2013 (UTC)
 * You're right that the mutations were certainly present, though probably still largely phonologically predictable (like in modern Spanish, cf. un [b]arco vs. una [β]arca). But the text only says the mutations were not apparent, not that they were not present, and that's true: Primitive Irish as written in Ogham does not indicate the mutations at all (just as written Spanish doesn't), but that doesn't mean they weren't pronounced. Angr (talk) 19:13, 17 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Also, lenition as such is a common phenomenon, typologically, only its grammaticalisation in Insular Celtic is peculiar; however, this does not require its presence in the common ancestor of Goidelic and Brythonic (either Proto-Insular-Celtic or Proto-Celtic or some intermediate stage), as it can also have developed in parallel through an analogous process – it's fairly transparent and clear how it happened, and the development looks almost inevitable –, and moreover, Goidelic and Brythonic remained in contact even after their separation and remained quite similar until about the Primitive Irish period, so they can have influenced each other and the development wasn't necessarily completely independent.
 * At least the lenition of /b d g m s/ to [β ð ɣ β̃ h] after vowels is shared between Goidelic and Brythonic and can have been present in the common ancestor, but the lenition of /t/ and /k/ after vowels is clearly not shared, as it yielded different results – [θ] and [x] in Goidelic and [d] and [g] in Brythonic (where /p/, which Primitive Irish lacked, was lenited to [b]). So there's no way to reconstruct it for the common ancestor.
 * By the way, lenition can be observed in Continental Celtic languages too, but it appears to have been a strictly phonetic process (but then, they died out before the endings disappeared, which could have easily resulted in analogous phenomena to Insular Celtic initial mutations), however, the details were also different, from either Goidelic and Brythonic (most extensively in Gaulish, where the results look a bit like a mix of both, though more like Goidelic, see here), so it looks like the beginnings of lenition are fairly old in Celtic (or lenition phenomena simply spread within an Ancient Celtic dialect continuum), but it was probably not present yet in Proto-Celtic. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:41, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

Irishness
It is clear that Primitive Irish was miles away from Old Irish, because many typical features are not (yet) apparent. But is any typically Irish feature at all apparent in these inscriptions? Does this Ogham Irish even differ from Proto-Celtic? Steinbach (talk) 11:42, 15 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Some inscriptions already show the change of /kʷ/ to /k/, e.g. MACCI instead of MAQQI for "son", which is distinctly Irish. It differs from Proto-Celtic (but maybe not Proto-Insular Celtic) also in the loss of word-final /s/, e.g. NIOTTA < *neɸātas, CUNA < *kunas, and CATTU < *katus. Angr (talk) 16:05, 15 April 2014 (UTC)
 * There are also some considerably more subtle diagnostically Irish features only apparent to a specialist, such as certain umlaut phenomena whose details differ in Brythonic if they are present at all, and points of grammar as well as typical vocabulary and onomastics. However, it is true that it is not trivial to identify the language of the descriptions as strictly an ancestor of Old Irish only and not of any Brythonic language (quite similar actually to how the North Germanic nature of Proto-Norse is not trivially obvious, now that I think of it). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:00, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

Ogham
The map shows Ogham inscriptions in not only Ireland, but also England (Cornwall), Wales, and Isle of Man. Does this mean that Primitiv Irish was also spoken there? Or does it mean Ogham inscriptions, including ones that represented a different language?--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 03:44, 13 October 2018 (UTC)


 * This has sat unanswered for some time. Yes it does. There were periods of Irish settlement on the west coast of Britain in the ogham period. Some of the inscriptions in Wales are bilingual in Primitive Irish and Latin. --Nicknack009 (talk) 10:19, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

"Of the son" vs "son of"
, your questions about the translation of MAQQI as "of the son" and AVVI as "of the grandson" are probably best addressed here on the talk page, not with clarify tags.

Basically, English, and your native language of Portuguese, do not have grammatical case, and speakers of those languages struggle to understand languages that do. It's generally throught that in a Gaelic Surname like, say, Mac Domhnaill, the "Mac" means "son of". It doesn't. It just means "son". "Domhnaill" means "of Domhnall". It's in the genitive case, which is roughly equivalent to the English possessive 's. Because English doesn't use cases*, we analyse the words wrongly and ascribe the "of" element to the wrong word.

In most ogham inscriptions, the whole thing is in the genitive case, including the word for "son". The example in the article, DALAGNI MAQI DALI: Dalagni is the genitive of an assumed Dalagnos, "of Dalagnos"; Maqi is the genitive Maqos, "son" (because it modifies the preceeding noun, and therefore must be in the same case as the noun it modifies), and means "of the son"; and Dali is the genitive an assumed Dalos, "of Dalos".


 * Not quite true. The possessive 's is a remnant of the Old English genitive case, and cases survive in pronouns, but I didn't want to confuse things.

I hope this provides the clarification you're looking for. I will remove the clarify tags. --Nicknack009 (talk) 10:06, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

"Proto gaelic" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Proto gaelic. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 April 12 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. signed,Rosguill talk 16:16, 12 April 2021 (UTC)