The Scottish Celtic review

The Laws of A uslauf in Irish. 99of wliifli beside the tti coutaineil in ttI-Oi, could very well be takenas an original conjunctive-formation.Ir. ibiu, originating, accordingto the Celtic phonetic laws, from jyibid, would have diflei'edin the stem-formation from ircofxat only by the reduplication,which, by the bye, we find also in Greek in the instance of theroot-form tti in Tmria-Kco.The absolute form tiasit (with it in the auslaut), which hasbeen compared by Stokes (Beitr. zur Vergl. Spr., vii., 45) withGr. arei^w, I shall endeavour to explain in Excursus iii.9. In the instrumental sing, of the masc. and neut. stems in a.In the so-called dative (characterized by w) of thisstem,twodifterentcases, in my opinion, have come to coincide in form, and thosecertainly not, as Ebel is inclined to assume, the dative and ablative,but the old dative and the old instrumental. Why it cannotbe the ablative-form is stated under (A. II. C). As regards thelaws of sound, no objection can be urged against the opinion that,e.g.,fiur {nom. fer., masc. man), niurt {nert, neut., strength), mayhave originated, on the one hand, from vir-di, nart-di, an Indo-Germ. dative-formation, but also, on the other hand, from vir-a,nart-d, an Indo-Germ. instrumental-formation. The latter hypothesiscommends itself especially on this account, that it enablesus to understand why the Irish dative without a preposition, isused only with an in.strumental signification (e.g., 7iach cruth ailiiv[in any other way] Z. 60S), and requires, when used with a purelydative function, the preposition do before it.Here I might especially point out as an old instrumental theii-case when it expresses the compared object after the comparative;e.g., ba mo amrii arailiu, (greater than another miraclewas ; nom. sing, amre, araile, from stems in ia). For otherexamples see Z. 917.In the same way, I explain the adverbs formed from adjectives,as in hiucc (paulum ; for prehistoric hicc-u), which are treated inZ. 608. In regard to its formation and vowel modification, thisIrish instrumental is to be compared with the O. H. G. instrumentalin 10 ; e.g., onit inuatu (cf Erdmann's Syntax der SpracheOtfrids, ii. 248).As an instrumental of a fem. stem in d, I regard ind or sa (hachora), quoted as an ablative in Z. 244. The instrumental agreeshere in form with the nominative. Similarly, e.g., the Vedicbarhand {" mit maclit," with might) is not diflerent in form fromthe nominative barhand. So, likewise, we may take the form