Saltair na Rann as both an Old and New Testament of the Gaelic verb

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

Abstract

‘The Irish of SR is at times so peculiar that one might seem justified in saying that it was sui generis, and belonged to no period.’ Carney (1983: 211).



Saltair na Rann
§1 The religious text Saltair na Rann (‘The Psalter of the Quatrains’) is a lengthy metrical synopsis of scripture from the Fall of Man to the birth of Christ. Running to nearly 8400 lines, and close on to 40,000 words, SR is arranged in a series of 150 canto, corresponding to the number of psalms in the Bible. Stokes provided an initial edition and translation of SR as preserved in the 12th-century manuscript Rawlinson B 502 (Bodleian Library, Oxford). Subsequent online editions were provided by CELT and by The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, the latter being the work of the late David Greene in collaboration with Fergus Kelly.

dating of SR 870-988 AD
§2 Although the manuscript versions of SR (Rawlinson B 502 and the Book of Glendalough) date to the 12th century, it is largely agreed that the original text of SR belongs to an earlier period. All in all, it would seem that the majority of scholarly opinion favours a late tenth century date for the composition of SR. STRACHAN (1895: 3) saw SR as a late 10th-century text and GOI §8 cites a date of 987. CARNEY (1983: 185), however, favoured a date of around 870 AD based on linguistic aspects such as hiatus, rhymes in unstressed final vowels, forms of the plural article inna versus reduced na etc. Mac Eoin (1960-61) argued for a date in and around 985-9 – the latter’s decision arrived at on the basis of his examination of the regnal lists and ferial dates in SR.

the verbal system of SR: as a tale of two linguistic testaments
§3 The main interest of the current paper is to examine the, at times, pronounced degrees of fluctuation in the verbal morphology of SR and to highlight the evident pivotal position of this text as one whose linguistic makeup is very much caught between two epochs of language:

(i) Late Old Irish (the era of the compound verb plus infixed object pronouns and infixed perfective particles ro, con and ad)
(ii) the ‘post-Old Irish period’ (or the modern era) characterised by the remodelled neo-simple verb in place of the OIr. regular compound verb (e.g. do-aitni ‘shines’ > taitnid) plus the free standing independent perfective particle ro (> later do) in place of OIr. infixed ro, con and ad.

Hence for OIr. regular compound verb do-airngir ‘promises’ SR fluctuates between:

(a) OIr. infixed ro in: do-raingert ‘promised’ SR 289, do-rangert 1071, 3081, 3164, 7253; very much in keeping with do-rairngert Wb. 14c32, Ml. 46c20, 136c12.
(b) post-OIr. free standing ro with the post-OIr. remodelled neo-simple verb tairngirid in: ro tharngert SR 3057.

What we have in SR, then, is a text which not only straddles the Old and New Testament of the Bible, in terms of literary content, but, from the linguistic point of view, SR may also be described as a text that straddles two verbal testaments of the Gaelic tongue, old and new. The current paper samples compound verbs in do-, fo, for-, con- and ad- and looks at the extent to which the new can be found among the old in SR. The paper also examines the nature of the infixed object pronoun in SR.

Original languageEnglish
Publication statusUnpublished - 2022
EventTionól 2022 - Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin, Ireland
Duration: 17 Nov 202219 Nov 2022

Conference

ConferenceTionól 2022
Country/TerritoryIreland
CityDublin
Period17/11/2219/11/22

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