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Primitive Irish or Archaic Irish (), also called Proto-Goidelic, is the oldest known form of the Goidelic languages, and the ancestor of all languages within this family.
This phase of the language is known only from fragments, mostly personal names, inscribed on stone in the Ogham alphabet in Ireland and western Great Britain between the 4th and the 6th century AD, before the advent of Old Irish. These inscriptions are referred to as Orthodox Ogham, although scholastic use of the script continued residually until the early 19th century.
The former represents the earlier tradition of inscriptions recording an individual's name, optionally with parentage, perhaps as a memorial or indicator of land ownership,McManus 1991, p. 44 whereas the latter resulted from a tradition of scholarly restoration of the writing system as part of the development of a Celtic art of Catholic Church art, in parallel with the use of the Latin alphabet in ordinary writing.McManus 1991, p. 128 Primitive Irish is known only from Ogham fragments, usually personal names, the earliest being dated by academics to the 4th century, although some estimates for the earliest inscriptions range between the 1st and 5th centuries. Scholars agree that the orthodox written tradition is older than the surviving inscriptions.Koch 1995, pp. 44-45Carney 1975, p. 57Ziegler 1994, p. 25 The latest inscriptions of the orthodox tradition appear to come from the 6th century.Koch 1995, pp. 45-46 The scholastic use of Ogham continued until the early 19th century, the last inscription being found on the tomb of Mary Dempsey at Ahenny in County Tipperary, which is written in both Irish and English.Ziegler 1994, pp. 93-96
Transcribed Ogham inscriptions, which lack a letter for , show Primitive Irish to be similar in morphology and to Gaulish language, Latin, Classical Greek language and Sanskrit. Many of the characteristics of modern (and medieval) Irish, such as initial mutations, distinct "broad" and "slender" consonants and consonant clusters, are not yet apparent.
More than 300 Ogham inscriptions are known in Ireland, including 121 in County Kerry and 81 in County Cork, and more than 75 found outside Ireland in western Great Britain and the Isle of Man, including more than 40 in Wales, where Irish colonists settled in the 3rd century, and about 30 in Scotland, although some of these are in Pictish language. Many of the British inscriptions are bilingual in Irish and Latin; however, none show any sign of the influence of Christianity or Christian epigraphic tradition, suggesting they date from before 391, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Only about a dozen of the Irish inscriptions show any such sign.Nancy 2006, p. 103 There is speculation about the orthodoxy of one inscription in Hampshire and two in Scotland, but there is no academic consensus on the matter.McManus 1991, pp. 44-45
The majority of ogham inscriptions are , consisting of the name of the deceased in the genitive case, followed by , "the of the son" (Modern Irish mic), and the name of his father, or , "the of the grandson", (Modern Irish uí) and the name of his grandfather, e.g. , "the of Dalagnos son of Dalos". Sometimes the phrase , "of the son of the tribe", is used to show tribal affiliation. Inscriptions demonstrating additional information are rare, such as , "the of the priest Ronán son of Comgán".Stifter 2010, p. 56 Some inscriptions appear to be border markers.Rudolf Thurneysen, A Grammar of Old Irish, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1946, pp. 9–11; Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Early Medieval Ireland 400–1200, Longman, 1995, pp. 33–36, 43; James MacKillop, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 309–310
The first ending, , is found in words equivalent to the so-called Proto-Celtic category of *o-stem nouns. This category was also recorded in the dative case using , with an inscription possibly in the nominative case also using . , in turn, is equivalent to Proto-Celtic *i-stems and *u-stems, while corresponds to *ā-stems. The exact function of remains unclear.Ziegler 1994 p.53-92
Furthermore, according to Damian McManus, Proto-Celtic nasal, dental, and velar stems also correspond to the Primitive Irish genitive, attested in names such as ,McManus 1991 p.102 ,McManus 1991 p.108 and .McManus 1991 p.116
| ! ! colspan="2" Monophthongs ! colspan="2" | Diphthongs |
In later stages of the language, scholastic Oghamist traditions incorporated five new letters for vowels, called forfeda (supplementary), corresponding to digraphs of the orthodox spelling, but these no longer corresponded to Primitive Irish sounds.
| Consonants of Primitive Irish in IPA |
The letters Cért, Gétal and Straif, Transliteration as , (or ) and , respectively, were known by the ancient scholastic Oghamists as foilceasta (questions) due to the obsolescence of their original pronunciations: the first two, and , had merged with plain Velar consonant in Old Irish, and the third, probably , merged with .McManus 1991 p.182Ziegler 1994 pp.11-12 However, evidence of the original distinction between straif and sail was still present into the Old Irish period, as the séimhiú (lenition) of produced (< Primitive Irish ) for lexemes originally represented by Straif but for originally represented by Sail.Stifler 2006 p.30. The lenited form strengthens the opinion that the basal form had an older, Indo-European derived pronunciation /sw/ that had apparently evolved into /st/ at some point later, but which retained the lenited form */hw/ for some time, which could easily have later evolved into /w/ or /f/.
The letter Úath or hÚath (transliterated as ), although not counted among the foilceasta, also presented particular difficulties due to apparently being a silent letter. It was probably pronounced as in an early stage of Primitive Irish, disappearing before the transition to Old Irish.McManus 1991 pp.36-37
Consonant lenition and palatalisation, which feature heavily in later stages of the language, may already have existed in an Allophone form, i.e., they were not phonemically contrastive yet.
The radical changes that characterize the transition from Primitive Irish to Old Irish are not uncommon in the development of other languages, but appear to have occurred rapidly in the case of Irish. John T. Koch, an American Celtic studies, theorized that these changes coincide with the conversion of the island to Christianity and the introduction of Latin as a literary language. The Irish language would then have derogated from the formal register of the language used by in their ceremonies and teachings. Koch believed that with the decline of paganism and the corresponding loss of influence by the druids, the language of the Irish Christian nobility would have supplanted the ancient Primitive Irish register of the pagan priests, eclipsing it completely in the 7th century. This would give the impression of rapid linguistic development, while actually representing a shift in literature to a vernacular register which had previously been obscured by the conservative influence of the druidic language.Koch 2006, p. 989 This new phase of the language shows influence from Latin, the latter having been introduced to pre-Christian Ireland, which influence became more pronounced following Saint Patrick's ministry.
This last phenomenon, especially marked in the genesis of Old Irish proper, began with an application of secondary stress to the third syllable of most words with four or more syllables, and also to the fifth syllable of words with six or more, in addition to the primary stress, which fell on the first syllable, as is typical of Celtic languages.Schrijver 2015, pp. 196-197 This caused apocope of (final) syllables, syncope of stressless (internal) syllables, and the shortening of all Vowel length in non-initial syllables, around 500 AD and the middle of the 6th century, respectively.Jackson 1954, pp. 142-143McManus 1991, p. 88 This loss of vowels caused consonant clusters to develop.
As an example, a 5th-century king of Leinster, whose name is recorded in Old Irish king-lists and annals as Mac Caírthinn Uí Enechglaiss, is memorialised on an Ogham stone near where he died. This gives the late Primitive Irish version of his name (in the genitive case), as . Similarly, the Corcu Duibne, a people of County Kerry known from Old Irish sources, are memorialised on a number of stones in their territory as . Old Irish filed, "poet (gen.)", appears in ogham as .Rudolf Thurneysen (1993). 9781855001619, School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. ISBN 9781855001619 In each case the development of Primitive to Old Irish shows the loss of unstressed syllables and certain consonant changes.
Gradually, the grammaticalization of consonant mutations introduced a new characteristic that Irish would eventually share with all other modern Celtic languages.Conroy 2008, p. 3 Old Irish phonetic conditions generated different Allophone mutations over time, and with the diachronic loss of the conditions which caused the mutations, those mutations became the only way to distinguish between different grammatical forms. Thus, the mutations became differentiated phonemes with their own morphosyntactic functions. For example, in the Primitive Irish phrase ("of the son", being a form of the definite article), originally pronounced , the initial would have Lenition to due to the influence of the ending of the preceding word. The variation in the pronunciation of the word would not have caused a difference in meaning; it would be allophonic. In a later stage of the language, the Primitive Irish word became Old Irish in, losing the final vowel which caused the lenition. However, in the Old Irish phrase in maicc ("of the son"), the m is still lenited, so the pronunciation would be . The lenition was 'reinterpreted' as being caused by the fact that maicc follows the definite article in, a rule of morphosyntax (grammar) rather than phonology. What was originally a phonological feature of the language therefore became grammaticalized.Conroy 2008, p. 6
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