The Scottish Celtic review

—The Laics of An da ut ii> Iridi. lUonot be the reflex of the original v or r, but of the d, which wasobscured in the instrumental. Cf. B. XI. 9; XIII. 2; XVII.XVI. ai stood originally in the last syllable.In the root syllables this diphthong is represented generally bj'e, from which the new diphthong ia originated, when the followingsyllable contained a broad vowel. This substitution of efor at, is seen also in the mono.syllabic e (he) = Old Lat. eis. Theai in the auslaut of inflected words, however, became early inIrish an i, and was then treated as an original 1' Here comeunder consideration :1. The nom. and ace. dual of the fern, stems in d. The moreancient i is preserved uncurtailed in the monosyllabic di, whichEbel (Beiti'. zur Vergl. Spr. ii. 70) already compared with Skr.dve. This diphthongal origin of the i is clearly and distinctlyproved by the corresponding did, duy, the ui, uy of which usuallyrepresent an original ai.In polj'syllabic words only the internali is now preserved; e.g., dt choisti (duo pedes; nom. sing, cos), forprehistoric coss-i (cf Skr. kalishe). The aspiration after di provesthat the original termination was vocalic. Very interesting is thefact, that in Lithuanian the original ai in this case has beentreated in quite the same way ; for mergl stands for merge, asdvl (= Ir. di) stands for dve. The more ancient form has beenpreserved only in the pronoun; e.g., te-dvi. Cf Leskien's DieDeclination, p. 106.2. The nom. plur. of the masc. stems in a.E.g., cich for prehistoric eqii-i = Lat. equi, Gr. 'l-n-Koi ; fir forprehistoric vir-i = Lat. virt. That this case terminated originallyin a vowel (not, as we might have supposed, in s) is evident fromthe fact that aspiration can be proved after it; as, for instance,after the nom. plur. of the article, which, of course, is formed inthe same way: in chnamai (ossa) Z. 215, 236.XVII. di stood originally in the last syllable.Of this ai thereremained, in prehistoric time, in the one case an i, in the othercase a u. How di became i may be explained by reference to Gr.Tj (pronounced, at a later period, like i); and how di became ii' In the ancient language e is also used for the plural : at a later periodiat—Cyrar. wynt (Z. 372), formed, probably, after the analogy of the 3rd pKir.in the verb [doherat), appears as the plural. The interrogative pronoun cia(who, what) reminds one of dia (god), and may, possibly, contain the stemcai-a, as the latter contains the stem daiv-a. The Cymr. puy (= Ir. cia) doesnot furnish any argument against this hj-pothesis.