LANGUAGESLANGUAGES
Early medieval Ireland was host to a number of lan-
guages, two of which stand out: Irish and Latin. The
first enjoyed preeminence as the language of the Irish
people and their Gaelic culture, while the second com-
manded prestige as the language of the Church and
ecclesiastical learning.
Irish
Irish belongs to the Goidelic branch of Celtic, itself
an Indo-European language. Goidelic was introduced
into Ireland by Celtic-speaking people, whose period
of arrival remains highly uncertain, with proposed
dates ranging from 1800 to 350 B.C.E. A date close in
the second half of the first millennium B.C.E. seems
plausible if one accepts the frequent claim in early
Irish literature that Ireland comprised different ethnic
strata of which the Goidelic speakers was the most
recent. No doubt other languages were being spoken
when they arrived, including perhaps non–Indo-
European languages and other Celtic languages. The
Goidels were able to impose a cultural hegemony on
Ireland such that by the time of the earliest written
records their language enjoyed a complete monopoly.
That state of affairs lasted, despite Scandinavian and
Anglo-Norman invasions, until the sixteenth century.
Irish, along with the other members of the Goidelic
group (Scottish Gaelic and Manx), is traditionally
labeled as Q-Celtic in contradistinction to P-Celtic, a
terminology based on the phonological criterion that
the former preserves the sound kw, which became pin
the latter; thus, Irish cenn(“head”) versus Gaulish
penno-, Welsh penn. The importance of this yardstick
in distinguishing Goidelic from Brittonic, the branch
of Celtic spoken in Britain (now represented mainly
by Welsh), has been overplayed. A more telling differ-
ence between the two branches is that in Goidelic
accented words are stressed on the first syllable while
in Brittonic the stress falls on the penultimate syllable.
The earliest evidence about Irish is found in inscrip-
tions written in Ogam, an alphabet specifically
invented for that language. It consists of twenty sym-
bols in the form of notches (for the vowels) and strokes
(for the consonants) carved on the adjoining faces (and
their intersection) of a stone pillar. Despite its curious
form, Ogam is based on the Roman alphabet and was
already in existence by the fourth century C.E. Its ori-
gins may be sought in Roman Britain or even colonies
of Christian missionaries coming from that province
to Ireland. Although limited in subject matter (personal
names) and linguistic forms (nouns in set formulas
such as “X son of Y”), the surviving Ogam inscriptions
provide invaluable information about the Irish language.
Not only do they preserve the linguistic state of Irish
in the fifth and sixth centuries, they demonstrate by
contrast how much the language changed over the
following two centuries. For example, contrast the
Ogam name CATTUBUTTASwith its Old Irish coun-
terpart,Cathboth. The former presents a form of Irish
that had a fairly simple phonemic system and was still
highly inflected in the manner of Latin, while the latter
shows loss of the unstressed internal vowel and final
syllable as well as a new phonemic distinction based
on a dual quality of consonants.
The earliest conventionally written records of Irish
date from the seventh century (perhaps even the late
sixth century). They are written on parchment in the
Roman alphabet, albeit a modified form marked by
curious spelling features, such as the representation of
the sounds /b/, /d/, and /g/, in certain well-defined
environments, by the letters p,t, and c, respectively.
This and other spelling peculiarities are explained by
the theory that in composing their alphabet the Irish
used as a model the Latin alphabet as it was pro-
nounced by British speakers. Thus, British speakers of
the sixth century pronouncing the Latin name Tacitus
would likely have rendered it by /Tagidus/, reflecting
sound changes that had occurred in their vernacular.
But since they were unable (or unwilling) to change
traditional Latin spellings to reflect such pronuncia-
tions, they established new equivalences between Latin
symbols (in this case internal candt) and local pro-
nunciation. It seems likely that the Irish inherited these
distinctly British treatments of certain Latin letters
when they appropriated them for writing their own
vernacular. Thus, Old Irish sacart(“priest”) represents
/sag ̇sRd/. The process of developing this new Irish
alphabet probably took place in an ecclesiastical (most
likely monastic) environment among British clergy
working as missionaries and teachers in Ireland, per-
haps in the sixth century.
For the early medieval period, modern scholars
distinguish two major stages of Irish: Old and Mid-
dle. Old Irish is broadly defined as the stage of the
language between 600 and 900 C.E.; Middle Irish
between 900 and 1200 C.E. A further division of Old
Irish distinguishes between “Archaic” and “Classical.”
The former, a relatively new field of research, refers
to the oldest written records of Irish dating from the
seventh century, which include the Cambrai Homily,
glosses on the Pauline Epistles, and the Irish personal
and place-names embedded in Latin documents such
as Tírechán’s memoir of St Patrick. Classical Old
Irish has been reconstructed from a large body of
glosses entered in the margins and between the lines of
Latin texts such as the Pauline Epistles and Priscian’s
Grammar in manuscripts dated between circa 750 and
850 C.E.