Compendium of Irish Grammar
Biouv.aa^. C0mpenbium of $rislj (grammar. COMPENDIUM IRISH GRAMMAR ERNST WINDISCH PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPSIC. Crpslaftb front i\n 6crman BY REV. JAMES P. MSSWINEY PRIEST, S.J. DUBLIN M. H. GILL & SON, 50 UPPER SACKVILLE STREET M. II. CUM, AND SON, PRINTERS, DUHMS. My INTRODUCTION The Author of this handbook of Irish Grammar, now made available to the English speaking student of Gaelic, is well known by his still more recent contribution to Celtic lore, "The Irish Texts." Availing himself of the previous labours of Zeuss, Ebel, and Wh. Stokes, he presents to us in this work the results of the study of those literary remains, which, even at this day, witness to the no less enlightened than fervent zeal of the early Irish Missionaries in Germany and North Italy. The sources on which he, with his predecessors in this hitherto neglected line of study, has mainly drawn, are Scriptural and grammatical commentaries penned some ten centuries back b3r members of those monastic colonies, which, at the dawn of Irish Christianity, swarmed from this fair mother-land of ours to scatter broadcast, to the furthermost ends of Europe, the seeds of godly knowledge and life, and of solid culture. In sending forth this translation, our pur- pose, to borrow the words of the Author in the Preface to this Grammar, is " to facilitate and spread the study of the highly interesting language and literature of ancient Ireland" in their native home, and to call attention to the value attaching to our ancestral tongue in the eyes of the cotemporary leaders of linguistic research, as marking a moment or stage of no vi INTRODUCTION.
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