Old Irish aue ‘descendant’ and its descendants

Abstract

This paper intends to study the history of the Old Irish word aue ‘descendant, grandchild’ in both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The former approach tries to demonstrate what forms this word evolved into from the early Old Irish period up to the end of the Middle Irish period, and to establish the phonological changes it underwent in accordance with our present understanding of the history of the Irish language. The latter approach is based on a linguistically annotated corpus of the Annals of Ulster, and shows the distribution of variant forms of aue in relation to the period they are attested in. The discrepancy between the two observations is discussed and various hypotheses are raised to explain it.

Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages

“…The Ml. and Sg. databases have now been incorporated into CorPH and stand beside other resources specifically made for CorPH such as the Minor Glosses database (Lash 2018), the Annals of Ulster database (Qiu 2019), and the Poems of Blathmac database (Barrett 2018a) In total, CorPH has over 120,000 fully annotated tokens of Old Irish text in various genres (glosses, annals, poetry, chief among them) and will allow researchers easy access to a large amount of data for research on linguistic variation. Some chapters in this volume (for example, Elisa Roma's and Theodorus Fransen's) have already made use of data from CorPH.…”