The Scottish Celtic review

;30 The Lavjs of Auslaut in Irish.1. The tenues c, t are aspirated after a vowel {tuath, people= Osc. tovto), and the spirants s, v are dropped after a vowel(roi-gu elegit, root giis) ;2. The nasal is retained only before a vowel or a medial, whilstit disappears before other consonants {'inoinivr puto, Skr. vmnye;but air-mitiii honos, cf Lat. mentio).If, in those gi-ammatical formulae, the first word-form ended ina vowel, then the anlaut of the second word, if capable of aspiration,was aspirated. The Old Gaulish ambi carpenton (circacarpentum) would have corresponded in prehistoric Old Irish toimhe diarixintan. If the first word ended in a nasal {n), this nwas preserved only when the anlaut of the second was a vowel ora medial. The Old Celtic decen equi would have been dechen equiin prehistoric Old Irish ; but decen fnrvi in Old Celtic must havebeen deche tarvi in pre-historic Old Irish.These conditions were preserved in the formula, even after theoriginal last sjdlables of the words had l>een suppressed. In thisway is explained the form which the examples just mentionedhave assumed in historical Old Irish : imln charpat, deich neich,deich tairb ; apart from the formula they are carpat, dcich, eich.In the Homeric language it is the verse-formula, in the Celtic itis the grammatical-formula, which preserved the prehistoric conditionof the language.Something similar we observe in the French language, in whichthroughout, as Ebel has frequently shown, much of the Celticspirit is preserved. Here the ancient t of the third per. sing, hasbeen retained in the grammatical formula aime-t-il, a-t-il.Alsothe drawing forward of .? to the following word, as in les angles,may be mentioned here.Terminations, the articulation of which depends upon theanlaut of the following word, are easily drawn towards it.Thishas happened already in Old Irish to the n retained beforevowels and medials, since we write, e.g., deich neich, sometimeswith a dot over an ii of this kind. In modern printing the modeof writing, deich n-elch, is to be recommended.This nasal is rarely omitted by mistake in the MSS., whilst, onthe other hand, the aspirate is less regularly marked, even in goodmanuscripts. But for the philological examination of a form, it issufiicient if aspiration can be proved after it in a large number ofinstances.In the native Irish grammar the subjects here briefly di.scus.sed,