errach

Old Irish

Etymology

Pedersen derives this from Proto-Celtic *wesrakos, an enlargement of Proto-Celtic *wesr-, from Proto-Indo-European *wósr̥. Compare Latin ver (“spring”). Stifter disputes this; he and Schrijver before him^[1] point out that **ferach would be expected. Wagner, and Stifter after him instead derive it from the precursor of Middle Irish err (“hind”), the semantics derived from spring being the "tail-end" of winter.^[2]

Pronunciation

IPA^(key): /ˈer͈ax/

Noun

errach m (genitive erraig, no plural)

spring (season)
- c. 850 Glosses on the Carlsruhe Beda, published in Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (reprinted 1987, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies), edited and with translations by Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, vol. II, pp. 10–30, Bcr. 37^a1
  ó errug glosses vere

Inflection

Masculine o-stem
	singular	dual	plural
nominative	errach	—	—
vocative	erraig	—	—
accusative	errach^N	—	—
genitive	erraig^L	—	—
dative	erruch^L	—	—

Initial mutations of a following adjective:

^H = triggers aspiration
^L = triggers lenition
^N = triggers nasalization

Descendants

Irish: earrach
Scottish Gaelic: earrach
Manx: arragh

Mutation

Mutation of *errach*
radical	lenition	nasalization
errach (pronounced with /h/ in h-prothesis environments)	unchanged	n-errach

Note: Certain mutated forms of some words can never occur in Old Irish.
All possible mutated forms are displayed for convenience.

References

^ Schrijver, Peter C. H. (1995) Studies in British Celtic historical phonology (Leiden studies in Indo-European; 5), Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, page 445
^ Stifter, David (2023) “The rise of gemination in Celtic”, in Open Research Europe‎^[1], volume 3, number 24, →DOI