The Scottish Celtic review

316 The Lavis of Aadaut in Irish.Beitr. zur Vergl. Spr. vii. 439) ; luta (the little finger), gen. Wan(the unaspirated t pointing as in the specially enigmatical patu,hare, gen. patan, to an earlier double consonant). On the otherhand, triath (sea), gen. trethan, the stem of which, tritan, correspondsexactly to the Gr. Tplruv (cf. Beitr. zur Vergl. Spr. i. 472)has preserved the vowel of the last .syllable only in the precedingone ; thus, triath is for a prehistoric trit-a, originally tritd. But,nevertheless, that attempt at explanation does not satisfy me inthe case of a language, which, notoriously, has other ways ofgetting rid of a double consonant at the end of a word: so, e.g., Ir.domun (world) has certainly originated from domn; for them, asshown by the Gaulish dulmo-, dunmo-, {Dubno-rcix, Dumnorix),has originated from b, and this was possible only when b stoodoriginally before n (cf Gliick's Kelt. Namen, p. G8). Also Muma(the province of Munstei-), gen. muma7i, is an example of anauslauting a in the nominative, without a double con,son;int pre-' ceding it.So far as the laws of sound are concerned, the difficulty existinghere is easiest explained by assuming that all the nominativeswith vocalic auslaut now mentioned, had, in prehistoric time, asigmatic nominative formation, like the stems in cmt and at,which were cited above (A. I. 2, 3). In this way, menme, menman,would have originated from menvians, Alba from Albans, and soforth.iThe last stage before the historic menme, must have beenvienm.es ; for the old stem mans (month), Gr. fj.i'iv (Ion. nom.yu€(V), has in Irish become mis (Z. 271), its s having been droppedin the nom. sing, mi in accordance with the Iri.sh laws of sound,just as in menme. In Irish, the loss of a nasal before a succeedingconsonant is indicated by the length of the preceding vowelonly in accented root-syllables. In accented syllables, thelengtlieniug either has never taken place, or else has again beenlost within the historic period.Like the stems in n just mentioned, the hitherto unexplainedstems in nn also form their nom. sing, with vocalic auslaut, as,' Leskien, by a process of methodical proof, has fully established the fact,that the Slav, kamy similarly goes back to a ground-form kamans (DieDeclination, p. 13 ff.). If, however, we allow every language its right to bejudged by its own laws, we shall not be able, in that case, to provethat either Skr. apnd nr Lat. homo has lost ns in the auslaut