Proto-Irish to Modern Ring Irish Ruairí Ó Conghaile September 2019 This is a very small comparison of terms in the Ring dialect of Co. Waterford, a Munster dialect, when compared to Old Irish and Proto-Irish forms. Proto-Irish is the noun I apply to the earliest stages of Modern Irish, Scottish and Manx Gaelic. I make a distinction between this and the ‘Primitive Irish’ language, that has also been referred to as Ogham Irish or as Ivernic. The latter is the language that has survived in Ogham inscriptions and there is debate as to whether this language actually became Irish, or if Irish was already a colloquial language at the point when Ivernic/Primitive Irish was being spoken. T. F. O'Rahilly. proposed that this Ivernic language was Brittonic, and provided the words ond - stone, and fern - anything good, from Sanas Cormaic a medieval Irish dictionary. But the language that these words come from the Iarnberlae language, which means ‘Iron Speech’, and is not derived from the word Ivernii. The Iarnberlae language was possibly nonIndo-European as neither of these words seem to have any connection to other words in Irish or in Celtic. The table below is used to help demonstrate the contrasts between the different periods of Irish. Sometimes the modern Gaelic forms come from words formed during the Old Irish period, but their pronunciation and grammatical meaning is completely changed. This implies that Old Irish and Primitive/Ogham Irish used grammatical functions in their own culture and language, which later became completely lost and fossilized in the later language. This is an implication that the people who spoke Old Irish and Proto-Irish were not necessarily the same people who later adopted Irish, they formed the language differently and in a way which is not found in later Gaelic, another thing is the phonology of Old Irish is, and sometimes its vocabulary, is closer to Medieval Brittonic languages than to Modern Irish. We can perhaps deduce that the speakers of Old Irish and Primitive Irish came from a less diverse cultural background, with the later changes in Gaelic after the Old Irish period, coming about as the result of Gaelic being passed onto speakers who were originally in a different and wider range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It is possible as well, that the modern dialects of Gaelic began to form at the same time as Primitive or Proto Irish, it would depend entirely upon how integrated Irish and Celtic languages were in early Ireland. Primitive Irish and Proto-Irish The Caighdeán timpeall Ring Irish Old Irish Proto Irish English h̍aim̍pẹ̍ l ? around abha, abhainn bhfuil, fuil ẹung̍ bẇiĺ timchell do·imchella aub, aban fil abū, abōn wele-, wíl-, fíl- beag mór b̍eg muẹr beg már, mór becc(ah) mār(ah) river Is/are, originally ‘see’ small great References: .The Irish of Ring Co. Waterford, a phonetic study, by Risteard B. Breatnach . https://www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk/sengoidelc/duil-belrai/english.html - SMO Old Irish glossary