Old Irish

En Celtia fálase moito do Old Irish. Vexamos como o explica un libro de etimoloxía do Gaélico:

Irish is divided into the following four leading periods :

— I. Old Irish : from about 800 to 1000 a.d. This is the period of the glosses and marginal comments on MSS. Besides some scraps of poetry and prose entered on MS. margins, there is the Book of Armagh (tenth century), which contains continuous Old Irish narrative.

II. Early Irish, or Early Middle Irish : from 1000 to 1200 a.d. —practically the period of Irish independence after the supersession of the Danes at Clontarf and before the English conquest. The two great MSS. of Lebor na h-uidre, the Book of the Dun Cow, and the Book of Leinster mark this period. Many documents, such as Cormac's Glossary, claimed for the earlier period, are, on account of their appearance in later MSS., considered in this work to belong to this period.

III. Middle Irish : from 1200 to 1550 (and in the case of the Four Masters and O'Clery even to the seventeenth century in many instances). The chief MSS. here are the Yellow Book of Lecan, the Book of Ballimote, the Leabar Breac or Speckled Book, and the Book of Lismore.

IV- Modern, or New Irish, here called Irish: from 1550 to the present time.

As already said, the literary language of Ireland and Scotland remained the same till about 1700, with, however, here and there an outburst of independence. The oldest document of Scottish Gaelic is the Book of Deer, a MS. which contains half a dozen entries in Gaelic of grants of land made to the monastery of Deer. The entries belong to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the most important being the first—the Legend of Deer, extending to 19 lines of continuous prose. These entries form what we call Old Gaelic, but the language is Early Irish of an advanced or phonetically decayed kind. The next document is the Book of the Dean of Lismore, written about 1512 in phonetic Gaelic, so that we may take it as representing the Scottish vernacular of the time in inflexion and pronunciation. It differs considerably from the contemporary late Middle Irish ; it is more phonetically decayed. We call it here Middle Gaelic, a term which also includes the MSS. of the M'Vurich seanchaidhean. The Femaig MSS., 10 written about 1688, is also phonetic in its spelling, and forms a valuable link in the chain of Scottish Gaelic phonetics from the Book of Deer till now. The term Gaelic means Modern Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic is written on the orthographic lines of Modern Irish, which in its turn represents the orthography of Old Irish. The greatest departure from ancient methods consists in the insistence now upon the rule of " Broad to broad and small to small." That is to say, a consonant must be flanked by vowels of the same quality, the "broad" being a, o, u, and the "small" e and i. Gaelic itself has fallen much away from the inflexional fulness of Old Irish. Practically there are only two cases—nom. and gen. : the dative is confined to the singular of feminine nouns («-declension) and to the plural of a few words as laid down in the grammars but not practised in speech. The rich verbal inflexion of the old language is extremely poorly represented by the impersonal and unchanging forms of the two tenses—only two — that remain in the indicative mood. Aspiration, which affects all consonants now, (though unmarked for /, n, r), has come to play the part of inflection largely ; this is especially the case with the article, noun, and adjective. Eclipsis by n is practically unknown ; but phonetic decay is evidenced everywhere in the loss of inflection and the uniformising of declension and conjugation.

There are two main Dialects of Gaelic, and these again have many sub-dialects. The two leading Dialects are known as the Northern and Southern Dialects. The boundary between them is described as passing up the Firth of Lorn to Loch Leven, and then across from Ballachulish to the Grampians, and thence along   that range. The Southern Dialect is more Irish than the Northern, and it has also adhered to the inflections better (e.g., the dual case still exists in feminine a nouns). 11 The crucial distinction consists in the different way in which the Dialects deal with e derived from compensatory lengthening ; 12 in the South it is eu, in the North ia (e.g., feur against fiar, breng against briag, <fcc.) The sound of ao differs materially in the two Dialects, the Southern having the sound opener than the Northern Dialcct. 1:i The Southern Dialect is practically the literary language.

Modern Gaelic has far more borrowed words than Irish at any stage of its existence. The languages borrowed from have been mainly English (Scottish) and Norse. Nearly all the loan-words taken directly from Latin belong to the Middle or Old period of Gaelic and Irish ; and they belong to the domain of the Church and the learned and other secular work in which the monks and the rest of the clergy engaged. Many Latin words, too, have been borrowed from the English, which, in its turn, borrowed them often from French, (such as prls, cunntas, cuirt, spbrs, &o.), Latin words borrowed directly into English and passed into Gaelic are few, such as post, plasd, ])eur, &c. From native English and from Lowland Scots a great vocabulary has been borrowed. In regard to Scots, many words of French origin have come into Gaelic through it. At times it is difficult to decide whether the Teutonic word was borrowed from Scottish (English) or from Norse. The contributions from the Norse mostly belong to the sea ; in fact, most of the Gaelic shipping terms are Norse