contrasting Ogham and Latin scripts.
Old Irish, written in the
Latin alphabet, has its earliest recorded texts possibly in the late 6th century; this is the traditional date of composition for the
Amra Coluim Chille, a poetic
elegy to
St Columba of Iona by St Dallán Forgaill, the first identifiable author in the Irish language. This work, however, survives only in heavily annotated manuscripts from a later time, in an old-fashioned form of the Irish language bearing little similarity to formal Old Irish. The first texts which are widely accepted to have been written in Old Irish date from the 7th century, at the inception of a national textual tradition which was cultivated alongside that of
Latin by the
Catholic Church in Ireland, and which supplanted the archaic literary traditions. 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
Celticist, 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
druids 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. 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
St Patrick's ministry.
Features Primitive Irish has a
morphology similar to other
Indo-European languages, however it did not display the most distinctive characteristics of
other phases of the language including
velarized ("broad") and
palatalized ("slender") consonants (such consonant alterations may have existed, but they would have been
allophonic),
initial mutations, some loss of
inflectional endings, but not of
case marking, and
consonant clusters. Old Irish does carry with it these distinctive features, as well as the loss of grammatical
suffixes, the introduction of the letter
p through
loanwords and proper names, the simplification of the inflectional system, the alteration of some
short vowels through
vowel harmony, and, most notably,
vowel elisions which resulted in distinctive consonant clusters. 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. This caused
apocope of (final) syllables,
syncope of stressless (internal) syllables, and the shortening of all
long vowels in non-initial syllables, around 500 AD and the middle of the 6th century, respectively. 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 , "poet (gen.)", appears in ogham as . 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. Old Irish phonetic conditions generated different
allophonic 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
lenited 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 , losing the final vowel which caused the lenition. However, in the Old Irish phrase ("of the son"), the
m is still lenited, so the pronunciation would be . The lenition was 'reinterpreted' as being caused by the fact that follows the definite article , a rule of morphosyntax (grammar) rather than
phonology. What was originally a phonological feature of the language therefore became
grammaticalized. == Phonology ==