The Scottish Celtic review

204 The Lau's of Auslatif in Irish.is formed exactly like the noin. jilur. thiados, ritnos. As theground-form for both cases, we must assume tautds, rthids. InIrish, these two cases differ, the nom. plural being tuatha, I'una(see A. II. 3), and the gen. singular tiuiithe, rune. But thegenitive also terminated originally in a consonant, for it is neverfollowed by aspii-ation. If the e of the genitive were less fixed,we might, without hesitation, trace it back, through a, to -as.But amongst the 61 genitives which Zeuss has brought forward atp. 242 of the Gramm. Celt., 49 have e, 10 ae, and only two a, one ofthe two being riind,ge.n. of hen (wife, woman), the sound-relationsof which are altogether anomalous.^ If we are not yet to give up -us,we should have to assign the separation of the gen. sing, and nom.plur. to a very ancient time, and straightway assume tautds asthe Old Celtic ground-form for the nom. plural, and tautes for thegen. singular. Of course, there are cases in which the long dbecame attenuated in Irish in prehistoric time; but, then, theresult of the attenuation is a long i in the historic time, as e.g.,in >^ (king), gen. rig =Skr. rdj, nom. rdt, Lat. rex. We should,neces.sarily, therefore, expect, not tuitithe, but fuaithi; and, indeed,an i of this kind is found in the ace. sing, tuaith n-, which, if ithas not been formed after the analogy of the i-stems, requires tobe traced back through tutin to tauten. (B. V. 2).If,on the other liand, we go back for an explanation of tuaitheto the Aryan genitive formation in -dyds, we meet with no phoneticdifficulties. The e-auslaut of many flexion-forms has originatedfrom a primitive ia or id (aile = ali-as and ali-d ; cf p. 191).In this way, we are led from tuaithe to tdt-ids. In this easilyinferred form, there is wanting of the ground-form tautdjds only'To this also belongs the gen. sing, of the article iana or na, which, like thenom. plur. iima or tui, is without aspiratiou after it (Z. 212). Since the a ofthe article is as fixed as the e (ae) of the nouns, the form of the article isfirst ofall to be treateil as sui t/etieris, whether its peculiarity, perhaps like that ofmnd, rests on its not yet sufficiently explained stem-form or on an anomaloustermination. By the agreement with the nom. plur., oae is reminded of theformation in -as. We might also, however, have the pronominal -asi/us, as inGoth, thizos, since the gen. plur. inna or na n- seems to contain the pronominalAsiXm (B. V. 1). With the latter conjecture accords the fact, that the fem.poss. pron. a, a (Z. 337) has been proved to be a petrified genitive, andhas been identified by Bopp with Skr. asyas (Ebel in Beitr. zur Vergl. Spr. i.176), as the masc. poss. pron. has been identified with Skr. asya. Similarly,the plur. a n- is to be traced back, not to am, but to usdm. Cf. Eng. his, her,their, and Fr. leur.