Jaskuła, Krzysztof, “Old Irish rhyming patterns and the origins of svarabhakti”, Journal of Celtic Linguistics 11 (2007): 49–76.
- journal article
This paper focuses of two aspects of the Irish language. In particular, Old and Middle Irish poetry is subject to purely phonological analysis from the viewpoint of a theory of representations called Government Phonology. It is argued here that rhyming patterns which were employed in Old and Middle Irish poetry were established as early as in Primitive Irish and, more precisely, at the 'shwa stage' (some time before 500 AD). From the purely linguistic viewpoint, there seems to be no other explanation for the fact that Old Irish poetry allowed single voiceless stops to rhyme with clusters, e.g. [t] = [Rt], while voiced stops were incapable of rhyming with sequences of two consonants, e.g. [g] ≠ [rg]. Also the ability of homorganic clusters such as [Rd] to rhyme with heterorganic ones, e.g. [lg], can be explained only if we adopt the standpoint that the metrical abilities of words ending in such consonant groups were determined when the phonological structures of these clusters were identical, which was during the 'shwa stage'. The other feature of the development of Irish discussed here is the so-called Modern Irish svarabhakti. It is proposed that this vowel epenthesis in fact occurred just after the 'shwa stage', in contrast with traditional analyses of Irish. Such a view results from a phonological analysis of different consonant clusters which, according to the principles constituting the theoretical model adopted here, must have developed in ways predictable by the theory.
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