Old Irish

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

Old Irish is the name given to the oldest form of the Irish language, or, rather, the Goidelic languages, for which extensive written texts are possessed. It was used from the 6th to the 10th centuries, when it gave way to Middle Irish.

A still older form of Irish is known as Primitive Irish. Fragments of Primitive Irish, mainly personal names, are known from inscriptions on stone written in the Ogham alphabet. These inscriptions date from about the 4th to the 6th centuries. Primitive Irish is still very close to Common Celtic, the ancestor of all Celtic languages.

Old Irish first appears in the margins of Latin religious manuscripts as early as the 6th century. A large number of early Irish literary texts, though recorded in manuscripts of the Middle Irish period (such as Lebor na hUidre and the Book of Leinster), are essentially Old Irish in character.

Old Irish is the ancestor of Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx (spoken on the Isle of Man). However, it is quite distinct from these. Broadly speaking, the grammar and sound systems of the modern languages are simpler than those of Old Irish.

Contemporary Old Irish scholarship is still greatly influenced by the works of a small number of scholars active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, among them Rudolf Thurneysen (1857-1940) and Osborn Bergin (1873-1950). Their books are viewed as required material for any enthusiast of Old Irish even today.

For more on Old Irish please see the Wikipedia entry.