The Scottish Celtic review

88 TliC Luivn of Aitdaut in Irish.However, the phonetic relations are perfectly regular, if westart from the pronominal termination sdtn. The fixed vowel aof inna, na, which never interchanges with another vowel, doesnot stand for dm, but for -dmm.Perhaps, then, the gen. plur. fem. of those two numerals, ieoraand cetheora, is formed after the analogy of the article. The samewould then also be the case with the by-forms ieora and cetheorain the nom. plur. fem., to which inna and na in the nom. plur,fem. of the article correspond. In the gen. plur., inna is theform of the article for the three genders. If my view of teora andcetheora be correct, one may assume that, in prehistoric time,inna was only the fem. form of the gen. plural, and that, therefore,the termination sdm occurred originally in Irish, as in GreekTauiv, /xovaawv, only in the feminine. The fem. inna, however,has foiced its way into the two other genders in the gen. plur., aswell as in the ace. plur. of which we have already spoken(A. II. 2).Could the genitive forms teora, cetheora, have also influencedthe genitive-formation of the names of relationship ? The stemsteor-, cetheor-, stood in a certain connection with the.se as r-.stemsby the genius of the language (sprachgefuhl). The difference,however, between teora and hruthre in the modification of thefinal vowel, may have been caused by the r of tewa being precededby a broad vowel, whilst in brdthre an c has certainly beensuppressed between th and r.[I do not believe this now; ir-hrdthreis like the Gen. PI. of the stems in -i and -u ; fdthe from faith ;inoge from mug. Also, in Gothic hrothar follows in the Nom. PI.brotherjuft, and other cases the declension o{ sunus.E. \V.]Ebel supposed (Beitr. zur Vergl. Spr. i. 170, 172) that athrestands for a prehi.storic atrdn, and that it has preserved the vowelon account of the preceding double consonant. Of the correctnessof this conjecture and of a snppos' d parallel case, I shall treat inthe last Excursus.The stems in ia, i, and ((, have also the auslaut e in the gen.plural (see Excursus i. ii.); but it cannot be supposed that thesestems influence the nouns of relationship in Irish.2. The ace. sing, of the fem. stems in d. The vowel of thesyllable -dm, before it was dropped, appeal's not only shortened, butalso attenuated.In this prehistoric -in, the above mentioned feminiuescoincide with the consonantal stems (B. IV. 3) and the/-stems (B. VI. 1). [May it be taken from thein ?]