Talk:saírse

soírse vs saírse in MI and OI

What does modified to match with Etymology 1 mean in Middle Irish Etymology 2? Was just older soíre influenced by (and later mistaken for) saírse? And, if it is so, then Irish saoirse, Scottish saorsa and Manx seyrsnys come from Old Irish soíre, and not, as this article and their pages claim, from Old Irish saírse. Or they come from both at the same time (because of the merge of soíre and saírse). But at the moment a reader sees that word for craftsmanship somehow magically lost its meaning in descendant languages and became freedom. ;-) // Silmeth ^@talk 16:17, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

It's complicated, but the place where the meanings got confused was in the nouns sáer (“craftsman”) and sóer (“freeman”). Once they were pronounced the same in late Old Irish, people began treating them as the same word (because a craftsman was free and not a serf), so that words derived from one might be brought into line with words derived from the other. Ultimately the modern words for freedom do come from Old Irish soíre, but through the intermediary of Middle Irish saírse. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 05:53, 20 January 2016 (UTC)