The Scottish Celtic review

196 The Laws of Auslaut in Irish.vowel has been dropped, and that the / in mogai is but the reflexof the lost syllable, in the same way as in carait (amici), for prehistoriccarant-is. The i could also, however, entirely suppressthe a, at least in writing, and thus originate the form mogi, likecnrlt (but certainly never pronounced with softened g and r).the form moga, the i has been dropped as in the 3rd sing, perf bo,ha, found alongside of bcji (cf Zeitschr. fiir Vergl. Spr. xxiii. 2-H).Lastlj', the forms mogae, moge, have originated in the same wayfrom the older mogai, like rdebling, raeblaing, reblaing, fromroibling (he leapt), for ro leblaing (pp. 204, 225, cfcc.)3. The nom. plur. of the masc. and fem. i-stems seems to havebeen formed differently, for it shows a fixed i in the auslaut, as, e.g.,in fdthi (masc; prophetae), siUi (fem.; oculi).InIf we could observein Old Irish the tendency, existing at a later period, to transferthe form of the accusative to the nominative, we might then thinkof regarding fdthi, si'tli, as accusative-forms used also for the nominative.Organically, fdthi, .s-idi could easily be explained byolder vdti-is, siUi-in (cf. Gr. ttoXic?). But neither do the laws ofauslaut exclude an assumption of the strong stem-form, as in thenom. plur. of the ^f-stems : from fdthi a prehistoric vdte-is ninyalso be inferred, and this form would lead us back through vdtej-esto a primitive vdtaj-as. In the gen. sing., the so-called gunavowelappeared as a (fdtho, fdtha, for vdtaj-as) ; in the nom. plur.it was attenuated. A similar process may be pointed out inGothic, in which the forms sunaus, anstais (gen. sing.) and sunjus,ansteis (nom. plur.) show the .same change. We have not herefollowed Ebel, who, in the Beitr. zur. Vergl. Spr. i. 177, has treatedas an intermediate form between -i and -ajas, an i contractedfrom ajis.4. The gen. plur. of the stems in u in historic Old Irish invariablyterminates in e, as, e. g., moge= Goth, magiv-e. In Irish, theguna-vowel is here modified to e as in Gothic. Starting fromhistoric moge, we arrive through the intermediate forms moge-anmogev-dm, at an Indo-Germ. maghav-dm.The case is similar in all stems in i. The formation of the u-stems prompts us to trace also fdthe, s^le, through vdte-an, siUe-an,and vdtej-dni, stUej-dm, back to vdtaj-dm, sillaj-dm instead ofvcUi-dm, s4li-dm, which might be possible according to the lawsof sound.The correctness of this view becomes farther confirmed throughthe stems in «.«. The gen. plnr. of tech is ftge, which can be