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Old Irish is the ancestor of all modern Goidelic languages: Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx . A still older form of Irish is known as Primitive Irish. Fragments of Primitive Irish, mainly personal names, are known from inscriptions on stone written in the Ogham alphabet.
Old Irish was a Goidelic language, and modern Goidelic languages like Irish and Scots Gaelic came from it. [1] People speaking Insular Celtic languages probably first came to Ireland at the start of the Iron Age, about 500 BC. [2] By around 500 AD, people in Ireland all had the same Goidelic language and culture. [2]
Old Irish was the first written vernacular language north of the Alps, and it first appeared in the margins of Latin manuscripts as early as the 6th century. Old Irish can be divided into two periods: Early Old Irish, also called Archaic Irish (c. 7th century), and Old Irish (8th–9th century).
This article describes the grammar of the Old Irish language. The grammar of the language has been described with exhaustive detail by various authors, including Thurneysen, Binchy and Bergin, [1] [2] McCone, [3] O'Connell, [4] Stifter, [5] among many others.
In 1922, after the Irish War of Independence, most of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom to become the independent Irish Free State, but under the Anglo-Irish Treaty the six northeastern counties, known as Northern Ireland, remained within the United Kingdom, creating the partition of Ireland.
Old Irish was affected by a series of phonological changes that radically altered its appearance compared with Proto-Celtic and older Celtic languages (such as Gaulish, which still had the appearance of typical early Indo-European languages such as Latin or Ancient Greek). The changes occurred at a fairly rapid pace between 350 and 550 CE.
The Irish Times, referring to his analysis published in the Irish language newspaper Foinse, quoted him as follows: "It is an absolute indictment of successive Irish Governments that at the foundation of the Irish State there were 250,000 fluent Irish speakers living in Irish-speaking or semi Irish-speaking areas, but the number now is between ...
