The Scottish Celtic review

The Laws of A iLalunt In Iritfh. 205the stem-tcnninating d. The supjn-ession of this d, after havingbeen shortened and articulated more and more carelessly, may beregarded, after the explanations contained in the last paragraphs,as a proper Irish development Whilst in luaithe, rime, the a of thestem has been entirely displaced by the e of the termination,we haveinthe forms in ae, like ^(mae = Lat.2)rt?TOae,^H6ae(fruticis),the stageat which the two vowels coalesce. The regular sequence of forms,therefore, is (/)) ldnid-ids,luma-e,ldinae, Idme. According to thisview, we have the j or i of the Aryan -dyas attached to the dfollowing, as it seems to me correctly, since in regard to the stem])ldnut, its termination in the gen. pldmdids begins with the /.Exactly the same beginning of development we find in Latin. Ifwe regard the Lat. genitives in ae, and their beginnings as organicformations, and if we restore the historic Old Latin 2Mtrid-i topatrid-is, supported by forms like Dianaes, Prosepnais, then herealso we find the i of the Aryan termination dyds attached to thevowel following. In the later stages of development, contractiontakes place in Lat. in the way peculiar to that language, andmodification and suppi-ession take place in Irish in the waypeculiar to Irish. In Latin, ids (or icis ?), passing through the intermediatestage of ies, becomes by contraction is, whilst in Irish,through the umlaut of (, and the loss of a, it becomes -es. InLatin, d-i is contracted into ai, ae : in Irish, a-e, through the suppressionof the a, becomes e.Le.skien, in his work on Declension in Slavo-Lithuanian andGerman (p. 38), maintains that, in the European languages, onlythe genitive-formation in -as occurs. I agree with him to thisextent, that this formation has been preserved in Gr. x'^/'"?'Umbr. tutus, Lat. familias, Goth, thliulos, and that the -ds ofthese forms has not possibly been shortened from the Aryan -dyds.But I cannot agree with his view of the Latin genitive in ae.Although in the few relics preserved of the Oscan and Umbrian,no trace is found of this genitive-formation, which universallyobtained in Latin, we are not yet on that account to infer withcertainty that it must have first originated upon Latin soil. Thatthe Irish genitives contain the Aryan -dyds, appears to me tobe pretty certain.[The third Excursus, comi)leting Prof. Windisch's paper, willappear in our next number.]