Page:Alexander Macbain - An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language.djvu/29

Examples of Ogam inscriptions are:—

Sagramni maqi Cunotami
"(The stone) of Sagramnos son of Cunotamus."
Maqi Deceddas avi Toranias
"Of the son of Deces O'Toranis."
Cunanettas m[aqi] mucoi Nettasegamonas
"Of Cunanes son of the son of Nettasegamon."
Tria maqa Mailagni
"Of the three sons of Maolan."

These examples show that the state of declensional inflection was as high as that of contemporary Latin. The genitives in i belong to the o declension; the i, as in Old Irish, is not taken yet into the preceding syllable (maqi has not become maic). The genitives os and as belong to the consonantal declension, and the hesitation between a and o is interesting, for the later language presents the same phenomenon — the o in unaccented syllables being dulled to a. The Ogam language seems to have been a preserved literary language; its inflections were antique compared to the spoken language, and Old Irish, so near it in time as almost to be contemporary, is vastly changed and decayed compared to it.

Irish is divided into the following four leading periods:—

I. Old Irish: from about 800 to 1000 a.d. This is the period of the glosses and marginal comments on MSS. Besides some scraps of poetry and prose entered on MS. margins, there is the Book of Armagh (tenth century), which contains continuous Old Irish narrative.9

II. Early Irish, or Early Middle Irish: from 1000 to 1200 a.d. — practically the period of Irish independence after the supersession of the Danes at Clontarf and before the English conquest. The two great MSS. of Lebor na h-uidre, the Book of the Dun Cow, and the Book of Leinster mark this period. Many documents, such as Cormac's Glossary, claimed for the earlier period, are, on account of their appearance in later MSS., considered in this work to belong to this period.

III. Middle Irish: from 1200 to 1550 (and in the case of the Four Masters and O'Clery even to the seventeenth century in many instances). The chief MSS. here are the Yellow Book of Lecan, the Book of Ballimote, the Leabar Breac or Speckled Book, and the Book of Lismore.

IV. Modern, or New Irish, here called Irish: from 1550 to the present time.

9 See Supplement to Outlines of Gaelic Etymology.