Blair Collection > Celtic magazine > Volume 12

The Celtic Magazine.
into the laws of desinence or inflexional termination, known in Ger-
man as " auslaut," has contributed the Celtic derivation to Curtius'
great work, and has written a compendium of Irish grammar
invaluable for its completeness and accuracy ; Rhys, professor of
Celtic in Oxford ; Gaidoz, who started the Revue Celtiqne, and
edited it till last year ; D' Arbois de Jubainville, present editor
oi i\\e Revjie Celtiqtie, who has written much on Irish literature,
law, and mythology. There are such new men in the field as
Thurneysen, Zimmer, Loth, Kuno Meyer, and others, whose
work is of great value, with the promise of much more in the time
to come.
Under Grimm's law of interchange of consonantal mute
sounds, Celtic takes its place by the side of Latin and Greek,
as against English and German. But it has its peculiarities : /
is entirely lost, except when t followed it ; compare atJiair and
seacJid to Latin pater and septem. It has changed, as the English
has done, the original Indo-European aspirates gh, d/i, bli to the
medials^, d, b respectively. Its present aspirates are later develop-
ments. Thus modern Gaelic f is but v strengthened, as fear is
equal to Latin vir\ while modern cli, t/i,ph, g/i, dh, b/i, are merely
vowel-flanked forms of c, t, p, g, d, b respectively. Hence we
have the rule that if a mute begins words the Indo-European
hard and soft mutes are unchanged in Celtic, while the aspirates
become soft mutes ; but, in the middle or end of words, the mute
is represented by its corresponding aspirate. Another peculiarity
follows from this : unaspirated e, g, t, d, p, b in the middle or end
of a word can never correspond to these letters in any other language.
They really stand for some double consonant. Thus the d of
cend stands for Old Gaelic t(cct), and it again stood for nt {centum).
Usually non-initial c, t, p stand for cc, tt, pp, as seac, cat, ceap are
equal to Latin siccus, cattns, cippus respectively. So^, d, b often
stand for c, t, p with a nasal preceding, as cbig stands for
quinque and dcud iox dent- . The liquids /, m, n, r and the sibilant
s stand for the corresponding Indo-European letters. The Gaelic
vowel sounds are very difficult to handle, for a succeeding vowel
affects a preceding one usually in some way, and hence it is often
difficult to find what really was the original vowel. Besides, it
is only a few years since a correct account was given of the