Page:Alexander Macbain - An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language.djvu/64

B 7. cf. Rhys and Jones: The Welsh People; v. Henry's Lexicon Etymol., p. xxiii., where he refers to the dialects of Modern Breton. On the periods of Old Breton see Loth's Vocabulaire Vieux-Breton, Paris, 1884, ch. i.

8. The presence of z (for vowel-flanked s) can only be explained by assuming that the Ogmic alphabet was invented or imported before the regular disappearance of s between vowels—v. Bezzenberger's Beiträge, xi., 144. Mr R. A. Stewart MacAlister, in his work on The Ogam Inscriptions (London: D. Nutt), suggests a different value in the case of z; in which case, if we have f for z, we require to read v for the f of this transcription of the Ogam alphabet.

9 Add K. Meyer's old Irish treatise on the Psalter (Oxford: Clarendon Press), his edition in the Revue Celtique of the Old Irish version of Tochmarc Emere; and Félire Oenqusso (2nd ed. by Stokes in Publications of Henry Bradshaw Society).

10. About one half of the contents was transliterated by the writer in Leabhar Nan Gleann; cf. Stern's critique in Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie. One of the chief poems has since been found in a good version in an Irish MS. from Ratisbon, of which an account has been given by the writer in the forthcoming volume of the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness.

11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. cf. the writer's treatment of The Gaelic Dialects in Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie; also Rev C. Robertson on the same subject in the Celtic Review; M. Macfarlane's The Phonetics of Scottish Gaelic; and Professor Mackinnon on Scottish Gaelic Dialects in a paper in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness.

19. "h in anlaut before a vowel seems to come from p. So apparently in Irish haue = πάις, and Hēriu cognate with πιερία. This change is regular in Armenian, see Brugmann's Grundriss, §30"—Stokes in Pezzenberger's Beiträge, 23, 44. In last ed. of the Félire Stokes regards íre as the cognate of the Greek word cited. But this does not affect the cases in which an historic h seems to represent a vanished p; compare the m for n in the derivation of amharus; and see Dr Pedersen's Vergleichende Grammatik der Keltischen Sprachen, as well as the second edition of Brugmann's ''Grundriss der Vergl. Grammatik''.

20. A great levelling, as compared with what one must infer from the historic development of Indo-European, has taken place in Gadelic. Dr MacBain's Indo-European Alphabet is therefore simplified in the gutturals, although perhaps it would have been more regular to have put in a labio-velar series apart. Osthoff recognises three k-rows, labio-velar, velar, palatal, in the