#middleirish — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #middleirish, aggregated by home.social.
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A remnant of this system I’ve recently noticed in Modern Irish:
tharla sé orm ‘he happened upon me’ (“subject”, ergative-type pronoun)
vs
tharla anseo é ‘he happened to be here’ (“object”, absolutive-type)You get examples like go dtarla ré cosaibh … í ‘so that she met (a figure’s) feet’ (“object”) versus tarladar ladrainn … ris ‘robbers happened upon him’ (noun subject + verb agreement) in Keating.
#linguistics #syntax #Irish #Gaeilge #ClassicalGaelic #EarlyModernIrish #MiddleIrish @gaeilge
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A great article by Mícheál Hoyne showing that #MiddleIrish was developing an absolutive-ergative alignment in its personal pronouns. This survived to an extent in Classical Gaelic, but (mostly) disappeared later.
The use of “object” pronouns with the copula in Modern #Irish are a remnant thereof too.
https://dair.dias.ie/id/eprint/1104/#syntax #OldIrish #linguistics #ergative #splitergativity #Gáoidhealg #Gaoidhealg #Sengoídelc