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.
For example, in the case of the possessive determiner a, only the initial mutation of the following word distinguishes the meanings "his", "her", and "their": ech/ex/ech/ex/"horse"a/aechex/a ech/a ex/"his horse"a/an-echnex/a n-ech/a nex/"their horse"a/aechhex/a ech/a hex/"her horse"bo/bo/bo/bo/"cow"a/abovo/a bo/a vo/"his cow"a/am-bombo/a m-bo/a mbo/"their cow"a/abobbo/a bo/a bbo/"her cow"tech/tʲex/tech/tʲex/"house"a/athechθʲex/a thech/a θʲex/"his house"a/atechdʲex/a tech/a dʲex/"their house"a/atechttʲex/a tech/a ttʲex/"her house"fer/fʲerbeccbʲeɡ/fer becc/fʲer bʲeɡ/"small man" (nominative)dá/daːfererbeccvʲeɡ/dá fer becc/daː er vʲeɡ/"two small men" (nominative)fer/fʲerm-beccmbʲeɡ/fer m-becc/fʲer mbʲeɡ/"small man" (accusative)Another grammatical feature signalled by mutations is relative clause attachment, in which lenition indicates the beginning of a relative clause, often in place of any explicit relative pronoun (although in some cases the verbal ending also changes to a special relative form).
Initial mutations did not apply across phrase boundaries generally, but there are some instances where this does occur in the earliest Old Irish attestations.
Lenition occurs after: Nasalisation, also known as eclipsis in Modern Irish grammar, is the prepending of a nasal consonant to the word.
Nasalisation was not indicated in the spelling except for initial voiced stops and vowels, where n- is prefixed (m- before b).
Nasalisation occurs after: Originally two different effects, aspiration and gemination came to be triggered in the same environments and thus can be treated as one type of mutation.
Palatalisation can sometimes affect the immediately preceding vowel: The development of palatalization has been traditionally separated into multiple stages.
Syncope of word-medial unstressed short vowels plays an extensive role in derivational morphology in addition to the inflection of Old Irish nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
However, when the noun was syncopated in certain case forms, the palatalisation reappeared and spread also to the final s, seen in the genitive singular doirseo /ˈdorʲsʲo/ and dative plural doirsib /ˈdorʲsʲəvʲ/.
Examples of the article fusing with the preposition include: Old Irish has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter; 3 numbers: singular, dual and plural; and 5 cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive and dative.
The accusative plural tended to trigger vowel raising, syncope of multisyllabic words, and occasionally u-infection.
The declensions of fïach "raven" and fíach "debt" demonstrate the contrast between a hiatus of two vowels and a similar-looking diphthong.
The final -r was preserved throughout the paradigm, and all but one had th before the r. Later varieties of Irish attached velar-stem endings to the plural of all members of this class.
Only bráthair "brother" (now no longer being used to refer to actual siblings) survived into Modern Irish with its r-stem declension intact.
Ben "woman" preserved a vestige of Indo-European ablaut, with a zero-grade stem *bn- evolving to mn-.
These nouns are bó "cow", brú "brow" (and derivative forbrú "eyebrow") cnú "nut", and crú "blood".
An basic example of these suffixes is provided by soirb "easy", with its equative soirbidir, comparative soirbiu, and superlative soirbem.
Verbs are conjugated in present, imperfect, past, future and preterite tenses; indicative, subjunctive, conditional and imperative moods; and active and passive voices.
Old Irish inherits a large amount of Indo-European verbal morphology, including: Most verbs have, in addition to the tenses, voices, and moods named above, two sets of forms: an independent and a dependent conjugation.
However, as Old Irish evolved, the A II deponent suffix -aigidir overtook these two means of derivation, having lost all semantic restrictions.
This sort of augmentation may also accompany another verb in the habitual or gnomic present to describe an action preceding another within an aphorism.
[* 2] In the e-subjunctive, the root-final vowel i of a suitable hiatus verb is transformed into e in the subjunctive and is followed directly by a personal ending with neither -s- nor -a- being additionally suffixed in between.
For e-subjunctive formations, these are sparsely attested outside of the very common verbs at·tá "to be" and do·gní "to do", and go unused in the prototonic forms of compounds, where a-subjunctives are used instead.
Independent personal pronouns have been reduced to emphatic and topical function, and only occur in the nominative generally following the copula.
These serve as direct object pronouns and are always attached onto the preverb preceding the stressed portion of a deuterotonic verbal complex.
For example, the simple verb caraid, conjunct ·cara "loves" can form a deuterotonic base no·cara onto which infixed pronouns can be attached.
Suffixed pronouns also denote direct objects, but are instead exclusive to the third-person singular absolute forms of simple verbs.
They cause mandatory syncope of the vowel in front of the voiced dental fricative d that serves as the absolute third-person singular ending, as well as devoicing that consonant termination to th.
Copular emphasis can create: Genitive and possessive modifiers of verbal nouns exhibit behaviour analogous with that of an ergative–absolutive language.
Wh-questions often use a stressed copular pronoun cía and an unstressed particle cia that precedes the dependent form of a verb.