Do Re Im or The History of the Prepositions

Urk ... where do I start.

In Old Irish, there was a fairly regular system of endings which you stuck on the back of the prepositions and presto, you had your conjugated form. But for a number of reasons, this changed to some extent over time and today we have a system that looks as if there should be some rule but it isn't obvious any more.

So how did you make a conjugated preposition in Old Irish? First of all, you needed the preposition. Next you needed the ending, which was derived from the possessive pronouns (mo, do, a, a h-, ar n-, far-n, a n-) not the personal pronouns. You stuck them on the end and there you were. Mostly. Let's look at this paradigm:

	Singular	Plural
1	-m(m)	-n(n)
2	-t	-b
3 masc/neutr	-u/-o (prep. with accusative) -e/-i (prep. with dative)	-aib (prep. with accusative) -u (prep. with dative)
3 fem	-(a)e (prep. with accusative) -i/-e (prep. with dative)	-aib (prep. with accusative) -u (prep. with dative)

Now we're going to solve Big Mystery 1. 3rd person -s pronouns. If you had a look at the page on lenition, you will remember that the old Indo-European definite article used to be sindo/sinda. And wherever an OId Irish preposition which even longer ago had had a consonant at the end, this merged with the s- in sindos/sinda and got carried over into our day and age. An s with history you might say. Let's look at an example: frith + sindos > friss > ris. Fascinating, isn't it?

We'll look at a few more examples, but not all (well, if you want more, let us know) and we'll also add the modern Irish and Manx forms for comparison.

RI

The basic form of this preposition was frith. With the endings we get:

frium

friut

fris

frie

ḟrinn

friḃ

frithu

rium riut ris rithe rinn ribh riutha

• liom *leat *leis *léi *linn *libh *leo

rhym rhyt rish r'ee rooin riu roo

In case your computer doesn't display it properly: there is a little dot over the f in frinn, which means the f has been lenited, so the initial f's were on the way out even back then.

We'll solve another mystery for you: in Old Irish, the r was not at the beginning of the word as you can see. The f simply got lenited away over time, but because fri was pronounced as [fɾʲi], the -r- was fixed in the linguistic memory of people as being non-initial and slender which is the reason why today we pronounce ri as [ɾʲi] and not *[r̴i] for the most part. If you want to know why some of these initial r's are now broad, read the section on modern ri.

The asterisk before the Irish line means that Irish has merged ri with le, so ri doesn't exist anymore as a preposition on its own and le is used throughout instead. Which can make for quite amusing idioms ...

AIG

The basic form of this preposition was oc; ocind with the article. With the endings we get:

ocum ocut occo occi ocunn occaib oca

agam agad aige aice againn agaibh aca agam agat aige aici againn agaibh acu aym ayd echey eck ain eu oc

As you can see, it's mostly regular. Except for the last form oca - even in Old Irish things weren't perfect!

MU

Now, we really want to look at one of those 'Nasal in Root' ones, don't we? This is also where the mystery of the weird -p- gets solved, because the oldest root forms of this were imb, although even back then imm had become the most common form ... except before certain endings:

immum immut imbi impe immunn imib impu

umam umad uime uimpe umainn umaibh umpa umam umat uime uimpi umainn umaibh umpu moom mood mysh moee mooin miu moo

Soo ... why does imbi lose the -b- and impe doesn't lose the -p-? Most likely because in the feminine 3rd person pronoun an s is kicking around somewhere (cf Irish sí 'she' or Old Irish a s- > Gaelic a h- 'her'). The mm is so dominant that it would normally gobble up (ok, assimilate) the soft -b- and leave no trace. But the -s- devoices the -b- into a much harder -p- ... which has been able to hang on till now. It would have gone something like this (the asterisk means that this form isn't attested (found) anywhere, but that we figure it might have been that):

imb-i *imb-se imbi impe immi impe uime uimpe

Manx has changed this set quite a lot. It has dropped the initial vowel and - much more interestingly - developed the form mysh. Probably to align it with more commonly heard 3rd person forms like lesh and rish.

DO

Last but not least one of the mad ones:

dom duit dó dí dúnn dúibh doaib

dhomh dhut dhà dhì dhuinn dhuibh dhaibh dom duit dó di dúinn daoibh dóibh dou dhyt da jee dooin diu daue

As you can see, do was irregular even back then ... so we might as well just learn it as it is.

Righty, we've had two questions - one about the bho/o variants and one about chugam/thugam - we'll try our best.

BHO/O

Interesting case. Let's look at the paradigm first:

(h)úaimm (h)úait (h)úat (h)úadi (h)úainn (h)áuib (h)úaidib

(bh)uam (bh)uat (bh)uaithe (bh)uaipe (bh)uainn (bh)uaibh (bh)uapa uam uait uaidh uaithi uainn uaibh uathu voym voyd voish voee voin veue voue

It seems that even Old Irish was at a bit of a loss here - in the old manuscripts you find both forms freely scattered about, with the h and without. Seeing that Old Irish isn't one of those languages which do not permit a vowel at the beginning of a word, it may the the leftover of some sound that was there a long time ago. The literature doesn't say much about this h unfortunately. In the modern languages this seems to have ended up as a [v] sound because the Gaelic languages are very reluctant to allow initial h- without something going in front to cause this. So [v] must have seemed like a good substitute.

And as you can see, Manx has opted to have the [v] throughout, Irish has dropped it completely (and has done so for a long time, not even the famous dictionary by Ó Duinín mentions a form with bh- !!) and Scottish Gaelic is undecided. Which in a mad sort of way is a nice continuation of this very ancient headache. In modern Gaelic it's really a matter of choice (unless you follow GOC too closely) depending on whether you pronounce the [v] or not.

GU

This one is a bit easier. The question we got was whether chugam or thugam was a "more correct" form.

cuccum cuccut cucci cuicce cucunn cuccuib cuccu

thugam thugad thuige thuice thugainn thugaibh thuca chugam chugat chuige chuici chugainn chugaibh chucu hym hood huggey huick hooin hiu huc

So what does this tell us? Quite a lot actually. the basic form of this preposition was co and all the forms are based on cu- so we can safely assume that the initial sound started life out as [k] to beging with and later lenited to [x]. So should we all be spelling it with ch- then?

Well ... yesno. The issue here is that in the modern languages, this sound has changed further to [h] in some dialects. Even in Irish you can hear two variants of this - both [xugəm] and [hugəm] just as you get both [xug̊əm] and [hug̊əm] in Scottish Gaelic. As you can see, Manx has opted for the [h] whereas Irish has retained the ch- spelling. It appears that the [h] pronunciation is more common in Scotland today that the [x], so it makes sense to use the th- spelling. Does that help?

So much for Old Irish prepositions. Sometimes it helps to understand the history of something like this - it doesn't work for everybody though.