Contributions to the History of the Deponent Verb in Irish. by J
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
444 XV1.-CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF THE DEPONENT VERB IN IRISH. BY J. STRACHAN. [Read at the Meeting of the Philological Society held on Friday, June lrf, 1894.1 THE object of this paper is not to investigate the origin of the T deponent, which Old Irish ahares with Latin, and its relation to the Indo-Germanic verbal system. or to discuss, except inci- dentally so far as they have any bearing on the subject proper, the theories that have been put forward concerning the origin of these forms.' Whether it will ever be possible to get beyond conflicting theories, and to arrive at any certain or even probable account of the genesis of the type, may be reasonably doubted. But, taking the deppnent as it exists in the oldest records of the Irish tongue, it should not be an impossible task to trace, with more or less exactness, its history within the Irish language itself, to follow the old forms in their life and decay, and to search out the starting-point and follow the development of any new types. The degree of precision with which such an investigation can be carried out must depend on the nature of the documents on which it is based. Where there is a continuous series of dated documents, each of which representa faithfully the language of its time, the course of the enquiry will run smoothly enough. In Irish, however, the student does not find himself in this fortunate position. For Old Irish we have trustworthy documents in the Glosses and in fragments of Irish preserved in the oldest manuscripts. In the later language we have metrical compositions like the Saltair na Ram, where the original forms were to a great extent protected by the metre. But with the mass of Middle Irish texts, some of them very ancient in their origin, preserved 1 Cf. Wmdisch, Ue6er die Perbdformen mit dem charakter r., etc., Abhandl. der Sachs. Ge6. d. miss., Phil.-hist. C1. x. 447 sq. ; Zimmer, Ueber das italo- keltische Passivum und Deponem, Kuhn's Zeitschrift, x5. 224 sq. ; Thurneysm. EZ xxxi. 62 sq., Indo-German. Forsch. i. 460 sq. ; Brugmann, Grmdriss, ii. 13886q. THE DEPONENT VERB IN IRISH-J. STKACHAN. 445 in manuscripts of the eleventh century and later, it is very different. In the transmission of such texts there was a tendency to replace old forms by modern ones. The probable extent of such corruption is not to be estimated d priori by the date of the manuscript. We shall find instances in which later manuscripts preserve the old forms better than earlier ones. And in the same manuscript different texts will be found to have suffered in a different degree. Thus, in the Book of Leinster, a manuscript of the twelfth century, the old deponential forms are well pre- served in many of the old texts, but, for instance, in the famous 2"ia 36 Chailige, the Cattle-raid of Cooley, they have almost vanished. In such a case as this we must suppose that in the one instance the old forms were more or less faithfully copied, in the other the language has been approximated to the language of a later period that the old tale might delight new generations. Such corruptions of necessity make the problem more com- plicated. Already in the Glosses the deponent verb has begun to pass into the active; and in a particular active form from a deponent verb found in one of these old texts, preserved in a manuscript of a much later date, it may be impossible to say whether the active form was original or whether it was introduced later. The remedy here lies in widening the field of observation j for by the examination of a number of texts of the same character individual peculiarities may to a great extent be eliminated. Another difficulty is the difTiculty of chronology. In some cases the date of the composition of a text may be accurately or approximately fixed from the internal evidence supplied by the subject-matter. In other instances it might seem to be fixed by the name of the author. Unfortunately we must be very careful in accepting mch statements ; there is, throughout Irish literature, too much of a tendency to fasten to the productions of later times the great names of the past. A third means of fixing approximately the date of composition is the language. But here again the development of the Irish language in its successive stages is a subject that has yet to be worked out. Until that is done we must rely in this matter, to a great extent, on general impressions, which accurate observation may prove to be false. The following pages may serve as a starting-point for the history of one particular form in Irish, the deponent verb. The results of such an adventure on a fresh field must of necessity contain much that will have to be modified or 446 THE DEPONENT VERB IN IRISH-J. STR.4CHAN. corrected by further observation and discussion. Something will have been accomplished if the way has been made smoother for those who come after. The main subject falls, naturally, into two parts. The first part contains a collection of materials for the history of the deponent verb; the second treats of the history of the deponent based on these materials; a third part will deal with some new Irish developments, whereby certain forms of the active verb have taken to themselves endings borrowed from the deponent inflexion. Part I., though it will consist chiefly of dry lists of forms, is a necessary preliminary to Part 11. For the Old Irish of the Glosses the Grammatica Celtica furnishes extensive 001- lections of material, though the further publication of Irish Glosses, particularly of the Nilan Glosses, enables considerable additions to be made to the material gathered together by Zeuss and Ebel. For the Old Irish of the profane literature and for Middle Irish there are no collections of any extent; here the work had practically to be done from the beginning. To ransack even as much of this literature as is already generally accessible would be an endless and a profitless task. What has been done has been to take a number of representative texts and to examine them carefully. This may lead to the omission of some deponent forms that might have found their place here; but, on the other hand, the history of the deponent is not to be learned from a multitude of scattered forms huddled together from a variety of heterogeneous sources. Apart from the glosses the material has been got to a great extent from the two oldest Middle Irish manuscripts, the Lea6har na TiUidhm (eleventh century) and the Book of Leinster (twelfth century). The former has been ex- amined throughout; of the latter I have read through all that seemed to be of importance for this investigation. From these two sources have been selected such texts as appeared most illustrative. To these have been added texts from other sources, such as the Sanas Cormaic and the Saltak na Rann, two works which we shall find to be of the highest consequence, since between them lies the breaking up of the deponent inflexion. In the arrangement of the material collected from these texts that order has been adopted which seemed to put the facts in the clearest light; it does not of necessity correspond to the order of the date of the original composition of the several texts. In the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to arrange THE DEPONENT VERB 1N IRISH-J. STRACHAN. 447 the oldest stratum of texts chronologically, and something besides has been sacrificed to convenience. The language of the Old Irish Glosses has been treated as a whole. Each of the other texts has, as a rule, been treated separately. This involves repe- tition, but that is a much less evil than would have resulted from the mixing up even of the material got from closely similar texts. We have seen the corruptions to which these documents hare been exposed in the course of their transmission. But they did not all suffer in an equal degree. For example, to put together the forms of the deponent verbs found in the LU. and LL. versions of the T&n would be to convey an entirely false impression. Beeides, it will be found that the presentation of such forms from a number of texts of various kinds and of various ages will be the most effectual way of illustrating their history. I. MATERIALS FOR THE HISTORY OF THE DEPONENT VERB. 1. THE OLD IRISHGLOSSES.' The deponent verbs here arrange themselves naturally in two classes. The first class consists partly of primary verbs like sechw, Lat. 8epuor, *tluohor, Lat. lopuor ; partly of denominative rerbs such as *comcalnw ' T fill,' from eomllira ' full ' ; cf. Latin denominatives in -8re. With this class goes a small number of rerbs that show deponent forms only in certain parts, generally in the perfect. Only those parts of the verb have been given in which the deponent inflexion differs from the active. That it map be clear at a glance how far the actire infiexion has The references are to the following editions :- Acr. = Codex Auy~tmCarolisruhensis, ed. Stokes. Bcr. =Codex Be tx Caroksruhensis, ed. Stokes. Pcr. =Codex Prisciani Carolisruhensis, ed. Stokes. Wb. = Codex Paulinus Wirziburgensis, ed. Stokes. Ph.=Glosees on Philargyrius' Scholia on the Bucolics, ed. Stokes (KZ. xxxiii. 62 8 Trans. Phil. SOC.1893). Ml. =Codex Ami;osianus, ed.