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On the Dialects of Scottish Gaelic. 359
tion ill Irelantl us Ma'daijui—the flcxional stage of classical Latin
and Greek. The genitive of the Latin noun modus is iiioifi Now
in Gaelic )nodi would be i)ronounced moji. Wiuni the tenniiial
syllable i was droitpinl the sound would be inoj : this^could b(^ represented
to the eye only as moid. So bardi would be iarji ; and,
when in process of flexional decay, the word was abbreviated int(»
barj, the monosyllable could only be represented to the eye as
baird.
Sometimes the cast otl' syllable drifted on to the adjacent word,
and its ghost still meets you at the landing-place. It is the neighbour
that feels the touch of the \anislied form ; the echo of the sound
that is still is heard— next door. In the Celtic languages when two
words are placed in certain grannnatical ivlations, they become, so
to speak, temporarily welded into one. They are placed under
the bond of a common accent, and are treated phonetically as one
word. The phonetic laws which obtain within a single word rule
within this group or grammatical unit, as it has been called. For
example, it is a law in Celtic phonology that a single consonant
flanked by vowels aspirates. In the word tndthair,
vowel on either side, has become th—mater, mathair.
t having a
If we take
the possessive pronoun 7no (my) and place it and mdthair in
grammatical relation, the two words become a unit, and i)lionetically
one word. In the new combination, mo + mdthair,
the 7/1 of mathair appears as a consonant flanked
and is aspii'ated mo mhathair—the m becoming
by
77ih
vowels,
in this
temporary combination, precisely as t became th in the individual
word, and for the same reason.
in English " mother," but " my vother."
It is as if you said
We thus explain the
peculiar feature in Celtic grammar known as initial aspiration.
In modern Gaelic initial aspii'ation has become in great part,
through the force of analogy, a matter of grannnatical rule rather
than one of phiuietic law ; but still, when wc find a preposition
like gun, or an adjective like ceiid causing the aspiration of the
following word (e.c/. gun mhaith, ceud ghin), we feel justified in
saying that these and similar words once ended in a vowel, and
that the law of vocalic auslaut is still in force, although the vowel
disappeared many centuries ago.
A more remarkable instance of the initial nuitation of consonants,
and one more germane to our subject, is due to the disturbing
influence of the nasal n. Within the word, in inlaut, n
in Gaelic assimilates d— benedictio, benedacht, bendacht, hennachd
before s, n disappears
—
mensis, mios, viensa, mias ; before c and t
it disappears, converting the c and t in the process into the corre-
;