Wiktionary:About Old Irish

Defining the language

Wikipedia defines Old Irish (ISO 639-3 sga) as the Goidelic language used between the 6th and 10th century AD. Earlier forms – primarily the Ogham inscriptions – are considered to be Primitive Irish rather than Old Irish by scholars, and should be labeled with the ISO 639-3 code pgl.

The border between Old Irish and Middle Irish is not particularly clear, and defining the difference between the two is made no easier by the fact that a large number of manuscripts were written during the Middle Irish era but in a language that was already archaic at the time. Certainly everything in the Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus can be considered Old Irish. In addition, words appearing in the Félire Óengusso (the poem itself, not in the Middle Irish preface, glosses and notes) can usually safely be labeled "Old Irish".

The Senchas Már (labeled in DIL as "Laws i", "Laws ii", and "Laws iii") and the Book of Aicill (labeled in DIL as "Laws iii" since it was published together with part of Senchas Már in one volume) can safely be labeled as "Old Irish" as well. But watch out: the texts in Ancient Laws of Ireland are copied and edited from very late manuscripts (many scribe-induced misspellings and poor grammatical forms will appear), and also are infested with commentary made after the Old Irish period! Fortunately, Ancient Laws of Ireland prints out commentaries as tinier text and the Old Irish portions in large text. If DIL marks a Laws citation with the word "Comm.", it is usually not old.

The Dictionary of the Irish Language includes not only Old Irish words, but also Middle Irish, Classical Gaelic, and Early Modern Irish words, so it's important to look at the attestations given in a lemma to decide what era the words belong to. It cannot be assumed that everything in that dictionary is Old Irish. Put any Middle Irish or Classical Gaelic words and forms in a "Middle Irish" or "Classical Gaelic" section and put any Early Modern Irish words under "Irish".

Thurneysen ({{R:sga:Thurneysen}}) covers only Old Irish, so words discussed there can usually be assumed to be Old Irish, unless he specifically describes them as late or Middle Irish forms. Matasović ({{R:cel:EDPC}}) clearly labels terms as Old Irish or Middle Irish and so can be used as a guide. If in doubt, it is safer to label a term Middle Irish since most Old Irish words will be also found in Middle Irish texts, but not vice versa.

Lemmas

Since Old Irish has no standardized spelling, for convenience we generally use the spelling of the Dictionary of the Irish Language (online at http://www.dil.ie/) as the primary spelling (unless there are good reasons to use some other spelling as the primary one), and list other attested spellings as alternative spellings, using Template:alternative spelling of. The lemma form of verbs is the 3rd person singular present indicative, independent form (i.e. absolute form of simple verbs like marbaid, deuterotonic form of complex verbs like do·beir).

The diphthongs /aːi̯/, /oːi̯/ should be spelled with ⟨áe aí óe oí⟩, not with ⟨ái ói⟩. The latter spellings are reserved for /aː/, /oː/ followed by a palatalized consonant.

Proper nouns should be lemmatized with initial capital letters even if the manuscripts do not actually use capital letters with these nouns.

Many Old Irish vowel-initial words are frequently spelled with a silent h in old manuscripts, especially very short words that would be only one or two letters long without the h. At Wiktionary, the spelling without the h is preferred as the lemma. Links and references to the preposition may link to hi but using link label functions to display i in order to keep using the standard spelling.

The raised dot (·) is used to show the "joint" of the verbal complex, i.e. it is placed before the stressed syllable. It is also placed at the beginning of prototonic and conjunct verb forms used in isolation (e.g. ·marb, ·tabair) to distinguish them from deuterotonic and absolute forms (e.g. marbaid, do·beir). However, the raised dot is not used in the names of pages. Thus the page for do·beir is called [[dobeir]]. (This parallels Wiktionary's approach to Latin and Old English, where macrons are used in display but not in page titles, and for the same reason: the raised dot in Old Irish is a pedagogical aid that did not appear in actual Old Irish writing.)

The hyphen, which is used between n and a lower-case vowel letter in eclipsed (nasalized) forms, is included in page names, e.g. n-óen, the eclipsis of óen. In deuterotonic verb forms with internal eclipsis, this means that the raised dot to indicate the joint of the verbal complex is not present in the page name, but the hyphen after the n is, e.g. [[don-essid]] is the page name of do·n-essid, the eclipsis of do·essid.

Of the diacritics, the acute accent is included in page names (thus fer and fér are distinct), as it is fairly regularly represented in manuscripts. But the punctum delens and the dieresis are not: sceïd is at sceid and muccḟoil is at muccfoil.

The language module knows to remove the raised dot, dieresis, and punctum when they are used inside a template identifying the language as Old Irish, so links like {{l|sga|do·beir}}, {{l|sga|sceïd}}}, and {{l|sga|muccḟoil}} will correctly point to [[dobeir]], [[sceid]], and [[muccfoil]].

io- and iā-stem nouns and adjectives should be lemmatized to end in -(a)e even if the nominative singular is unattested or its DIL headword ends in -a.

What an entry should include

WT:ELE is the general guide to entry layout. Old Irish entries should follow that guide; sections that are especially to be remembered are "Alternative forms" (since Old Irish has so many of them!) and "Descendants", where the Middle Irish, modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx descendants of the word should be listed.

Old Irish pronunciation is often rather speculative, but if pronunciation information is included, be sure to add |sga as the first positional parameter of the {{IPA}} template. This will create a link to Appendix:Old Irish pronunciation, where our conventions for the phonemic representation of Old Irish are given.

Verb conjugations may be shown by means of the conjugation-table templates {{sga-conj-complex}} and {{sga-conj-simple}}. For nouns, there are several declension-table templates listed at Category:Old Irish noun inflection-table templates. For mutations, use {{sga-mutation}}.

When creating a new entry for an Old Irish word, remember to create links to it too. The "Translations" section of the corresponding English word should include a line for Old Irish (indented below the line for Irish), and the entries for the modern Goidelic descendants should include an "Etymology" section that links to the Old Irish word.

Formatting quotations

Quotations are usually edited for readability and thus may deviate from the spellings used in the Thesaurus Palaehibernicus, which follows the manuscript spelling fairly strictly.

1. Spaces are added to separate words from each other (in manuscripts, unstressed words tend to be written together with the nearest stressed word), and raised dots are added into deuterotonic verb forms.
   • For example, asbeir inbensin (“that woman says”) is resolved to as·beir in ben sin here.
2. A nonbreaking hyphen (‑) is added between n and a lower-case vowel under eclipsis (nasalization), as in modern Irish. A normal hyphen is also added between a function word (a noun, verb, or adjective) and an emphatic suffix; but no hyphen is added in emphatic (personal or prepositional) pronouns.
   • For example, arnathairni (“our father”) is resolved to ar n‑athair-ni (or to ar nAthair-ni (“our Father”) if the father being referred to is God).
   • Pronouns such as messe and lemsa, however, are written without a hyphen.
3. An acute accent is added over a vowel known to be long, even when the accent mark is missing in the manuscript; likewise the lenition dot is added over f and s whenever these are lenited.
   • For example, intsil (“of the seed”) is resolved to int ṡíl.
4. Latin words within Old Irish quotes are written thus: {{m|la||uerbum}} (i.e. |1= is empty and the word is put in |2=), which prevents linking to the Latin word while also displaying the word in italics and marking it as Latin in the HTML.
5. The Leiden conventions are followed for scribal misspellings; in particular, curly brackets { } indicate any letters present in the manuscript that should not be, and angled brackets ⟨ ⟩ indicate any letters missing from the manuscript that should be present.
   • For example, a manuscript spelling nitabratatar for expected nitabratar (“they are not brought”) is rendered ní tabrat{at}ar, while a manuscript spelling dorasam for expected doratsam (“we have given”) is rendered do·ra⟨t⟩sam.
6. As an exception to the above, the spelling ct to represent [xt] is so common that it cannot be considered a misspelling and thus does not need to be "corrected" to c⟨h⟩t. Likewise, p is so frequently not marked as being lenited in contexts where lenition is expected that it seems likely to have been deliberate.
   • For example, act (“but”) is not resolved to ac⟨h⟩t, nor is apecthae (“of his sins”) resolved to a p⟨h⟩ecthae.
7. The Insular script used in manuscripts does not distinguish between upper and lower case; we follow the modern Irish practice of capitalizing proper nouns and adjectives affiliated with them. (This is true not only in quotations but in entries as well.)
   • For example, égept (“Egypt”) and égiptda (“Egyptian”) are resolved to Égept and Égiptda.
8. Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus uses roman type to indicate that an abbreviation has been expanded; we do not indicate expanded abbreviations here.
   • For example, in Thes. one may see "nieper" “he does not say” to indicate that the manuscript uses a scribal abbreviation for the er; here, that is resolved simply to ní eper.
9. Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus is no longer under copyright, so its English translations may be used directly. However, some editors prefer to update the translations to avoid dated or archaic language (e.g. using "you sg" and "you pl" rather than "thou" and "ye") or to reflect a more recent scholar's interpretation of the passage.

Pronunciation

See Appendix:Old Irish pronunciation.

Appendices and templates

See Category:Old Irish appendices and Category:Old Irish templates.