The Scottish Celtic review

36 Th,' Imwa of A mlaut in Irish.But -aitt-a would lead to a medial form altogethei' unusual inthe present iudieative active, whilst -anf-it would lead to anindicative form unheard of in this tense. I believe, therefore,that the aspiration which has been proved in some places afterthe 3rd person j)lur. in at must be otherwise accounted for. Thatthere may be cases, in which the aspiration could not have beencaused by the original auslaut of the preceding word, Stokes hasalready shown in his tract Fis Adamnain. Thus, the prepositionCO (ad), when joined with pronominal elements, sometimes inOld Irish, but regularly in the middle and later language, tookthe form chuc- (chucu. ad eos, chuciim ad me, &c.). Also, in thebefore-mentioned asmbiur frit (quod dico tibi), the silencing of/'has probably not been caused by the preceding word, since thepreposition fri loses its /gradually in all other places. Of otherwords there are especially the particles thra and cheva, which, inearly Middle Irish, appear nearly always with aspirated anlaut.In chucu foj- cuc'U the aspiration may have been produced by acertain tendency towards phonetic dissimilarity, in other casesthrough the carelessness with which enclitic and proclitic wordswere pronounced. But they evidently are cases, in which aspirationhas been used in a transferred or figurative manner to denoterelationship or dependence, when of two words the succeedingwas closely connected with the preceding one, in the constructionand pronunciation of a sentence.To these I add those, which, if the aspiration appears in therelative verbal-forms, follow immediately after their relativewords. This usage is not prevalent, but it is found, for example,in inani choi^ite (eorum qui deplorant, Z. 181), ni fri biastachathai(/mit-ni (it is not against beasts that we fight). In NewIrish it has become a rule to distinguish the accusative of thepronoun of the second person by the aspirated form thu from thenominative ti'i (O'Donovan's Ir. Giamm., p. 127). Of the samekind are probably those cases, in which after the 3rd plur. in -at,-et, the object immediately following has been aspirated, as infodalet chenil. We may expect this aspiration also after everyother verbal-foi'm, and, indeed, we find vo gab chrine (cepitmarcorem) given in Z. 182. Also, the aspiration of the subjector the predicate immediately after the copula, of which I havegiven above the example, act ropat saini (modi sint diversae),I should like to explain in a similar manner : here the aspirationwas originally rightly used only, when the form of the copula, as