Consonants The
consonant inventory of Old Irish is shown in the chart below. The complexity of Old Irish phonology is from a four-way split of phonemes inherited from Primitive Irish, with both a
fortis–lenis and a "broad–slender" (
velarised vs.
palatalised) distinction arising from historical changes. The sounds are the broad lenis equivalents of broad fortis ; likewise for the slender (palatalised) equivalents. (However, most sounds actually derive historically from , since was relatively rare in Old Irish, being a recent import from other languages such as Latin.) : Some details of Old Irish
phonetics are not known. may have been pronounced or , as in Modern Irish. may have been the same sound as or . The precise articulation of the fortis
sonorants is unknown, but they were probably longer,
tenser and generally more strongly articulated than their lenis counterparts , as in the Modern Irish and Scottish dialects that still possess a four-way distinction in the
coronal nasals and
laterals. and may have been pronounced and respectively. The difference between and may have been that the former were
trills while the latter were
flaps. and were derived from an original fortis–lenis pair.
Vowels Old Irish had distinctive
vowel length in both
monophthongs and
diphthongs. Short diphthongs were
monomoraic, taking up the same amount of time as short vowels, while long diphthongs were bimoraic, the same as long vowels. (This is much like the situation in
Old English but different from
Ancient Greek whose shorter and longer diphthongs were bimoraic and trimoraic, respectively: vs. .) The inventory of Old Irish long vowels changed significantly over the Old Irish period, but the short vowels changed much less. The following short vowels existed: : 1The short diphthong likely existed very early in the Old Irish period, but merged with later on and in many instances was replaced with due to paradigmatic levelling. It is attested once in the phrase by the
prima manus of the
Würzburg Glosses. arose from the u-infection of stressed by a that preceded a palatalized consonant. This vowel faced much inconsistency in spelling, often detectable by a word containing it being variably spelled with across attestations. "hill, mound" is the most commonly cited example of this vowel, with the spelling of its inflections including
tulach itself,
telaig,
telocho,
tilchaib,
taulich and
tailaig. This special vowel also ran rampant in many words starting with the stressed prefix (from Proto-Celtic
*ɸare). Archaic Old Irish (before about 750) had the following inventory of long vowels: : 1Both and were normally written but must have been pronounced differently because they have different origins and distinct outcomes in later Old Irish. stems from Proto-Celtic *ē (2A similar distinction may have existed between and , both written , and stemming respectively from former diphthongs (*eu, *au, *ou) and from compensatory lengthening. However, in later Old Irish both sounds appear usually as , sometimes as , and it is unclear whether existed as a separate sound any time in the Old Irish period. 3 existed only in early archaic Old Irish (700 or earlier); afterwards it merged into . Neither sound occurred before another consonant, and both sounds became in later Old Irish (often or before another vowel). The late does not develop into , suggesting that > postdated > . Later Old Irish had the following inventory of long vowels: : 1Early Old Irish and merged in later Old Irish. It is unclear what the resulting sound was, as scribes continued to use both and to indicate the merged sound. The choice of in the table above is somewhat arbitrary. The distribution of short
vowels in
unstressed syllables is a little complicated. All short vowels may appear in absolutely final position (at the very end of a word) after both broad and slender consonants. The front vowels and are often spelled and after broad consonants, which might indicate a retracted pronunciation here, perhaps something like and . All ten possibilities are shown in the following examples: : The distribution of short vowels in unstressed syllables, other than when absolutely final, was quite restricted. It is usually thought that there were only two allowed phonemes: (written depending on the quality of surrounding consonants) and (written or ). The phoneme tended to occur when the following syllable contained an *ū in
Proto-Celtic (for example, "law" (dat.) < PC *
dligedū), or after a broad
labial (for example, "book"; "world"). The phoneme occurred in other circumstances. The occurrence of the two phonemes was generally unrelated to the nature of the corresponding Proto-Celtic vowel, which could be any monophthong: long or short. Long vowels also occur in unstressed syllables. However, they rarely reflect Proto-Celtic long vowels, which were shortened prior to the deletion (syncope) of inner syllables. Rather, they originate in one of the following ways: • from the late resolution of a
hiatus of two adjacent vowels (usually as a result of loss of *s between vowels); • from
compensatory lengthening in response to loss of a consonant ( "kindred, gender" < *
cenethl; "I have purchased" < *
-chechr, preterite of "buys"); • from assimilation of an unstressed vowel to a corresponding long stressed vowel; • from late compounding; • from lengthening of short vowels before unlenited , still in progress in Old Irish (compare "highest" vs. "peak").
Stress Stress is generally on the first syllable of a word. However, in verbs it occurs on the second syllable when the first syllable is a
clitic (the verbal prefix in "he says"). In such cases, the unstressed prefix is indicated in grammatical works with a following
centre dot (). == Orthography ==