Old Irish – Morphology, Part 4
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Stifter, David
Introduction to the formation of verbal stems in Old Irish.
 Welcome back to the fourth and final session about the morphology of Old Irish. In this session I will give an overview of the most important processes that lie behind the formation of the tense and mood stems of Old Irish, verbs and how new verbs can be created. As always, this is only a very rough overview and I will gloss over many subtle sub-rules. Old Irish displays a fairly clear-cut morphological dichotomy between so-called weak verbs and strong verbs. In the case of weak verbs, the tense and mood stems are derivable by predictable, productive rules. There is fundamentally one type of formation for the various tense and mood stems in the weak stems and they are all derived from the defaults present stem. Strong verbs show a much greater variety of morphological processes and the stem formations are essentially unpredictable. In most cases, these processes depend on the underlying abstract root shape and the root undergoes various modifications. Supplation, that is, making use of two or more different lexical roots within a paradigm is not as prominent in Old Irish as one would be inclined to think if one has been exposed to its verbal system for the first time. But there are actually some remarkable examples, so the simple verb to go builds on seven or eight different roots or root variants in its paradigm. In the following, all the reconstructions and underlying roots that I will be using will reflect protochaltic forms unless I specify explicitly protein European reconstructions. In the prehistory of the language and still in early Old Irish, the verbal system is largely root-based. By this I mean that the various stems can be derived from an abstract underlying root which usually can be related with an Indo-European root. However, during the historic period, verbal morphology moves away from this root-based system towards one where the invariant present stem assumes the central rule from which everything else derives, like it already does with weak verbs in the Old Irish period. I will now talk about the morphological strategies that can be found in the stem formation of Old Irish verbs. Suffixation is the strategy that Old Irish weak verbs use almost exclusively. First of all, this is how many weak verbs are created in the first place. A suffix is added to a nominal base and turns it into a verb. For instance, the adjective mor big plus a vocali suffix creates the verb morith to make big, which actually means to praise. Or rith number plus another suffix creates the verb rith to count. The stem that is created in this way for the present tense serves then as the basis from which all other tenses and moves are regularly derived. I will therefore refer to the present stem also as the default stem. For the subjunctive, another vocali suffix in I is added to the default stem, and therefore it's called our subjunctive. The f future, the s-pratrate and the pratrate passive are formed in similar ways. Even the verbal noun is formed in a regular fashion, but not in all cases as you can see from the absence of the vith in this list. These are the productive stem formations. During the attested history of the Irish language, these suffixal formations replace most of the other formations that I will discuss from now on. For strong verbs, suffixation plays only a minor role in the earliest phase of old Irish. It is important for the formation of the present stem, but note that for strong verbs, the present does not function as a default stem as it does with weak verbs. The present stem is derived from the root in just the same way as all the other tense and mood stems are derived from it. The suffixes that we encounter are the well-known ones from other European languages, the eo suffix, the yeo suffix or the suffix ske to name just a few. Outside of the present stem, the only places where suffixation plays an appreciable role is in the r subjunctive and in the t-pratrate. The t-pratrate is formed by about 20 verbs which add t to the root to get a pratrate stem, for instance dadith to bull, i.e. to treat a cow like a bull does, which becomes dart, bull. Historically speaking, this is a novel suffix. The t, the t, was originally the ending of the third person singular, which was reinterpreted as a suffix plus a zero ending. Far more important for the strong verbs are what I grew up here together as modifications of the root, namely infixation, rejuplication, truncation and vocolic alternations. Infixation is really only nasal infixation in the present stem of the familiar type known from other Indo-European languages. The nasal is absent from all other tenses and moods. In the second example here, the root bal to throw, one can see that the nasal infix has become obscured synchronicly in old Irish and that it surfaces simply as a germination of the double L. Rejuplication has a much wider functional domain. Even though by the time we get to old Irish, it has already lost a little bit of ground. Primitive Irish sound changes had depleted the number of forms that show overt rejuplication and have transferred them to morphological types that I will discuss in a minute. When I speak about rejuplication now, I'm chiefly concerned actually with overt rejuplication. Rejuplication plays no longer any role in the formation of present stems. There are just two verbs that show fossilized, obscured rejuplication historically speaking, but synchronicly the rejuplication is no longer realized as such. These are Ivid grinks from Indo-European Piprachty and Arshishidar stays remains from Sistach. In future formations, rejuplication is very common. The rejuplicating vowel is I, but it can appear in various guises on the surface. Since rejuplication means that an extra syllable is added to the word, it automatically entails synchroby of the following syllable. As a consequence, the vowel of the original root is lost. Typical examples are ganithir is born from the root gen, which becomes guernithir. The root itself is the gln here in the middle. The gui is the rejuplicating syllable. Or the rid they will sell. What remains of the root is actually the R here in the middle from the root li compared with the present stem reynith. Or kechna, again the root is kan, rejuplicated here as kechna, with a chn being the root part. In those preterates that make use of rejuplication, the main type uses a as a rejuplicating vowel. For instance the first plural, lellramer, we likt from lirith to lik. But there are a lot of other variants besides such as i, we have here kech from keith, or o in lollich from inline from the root lung. And a relative kechne, husang from the root kan, in the verb kanith to sing. Root truncation is probably the most astonishing method of stem formation. Like so many other things of the grammatical behaviour of old Irish, truncation is the reflex of phonological reductions that happened in primitive Irish and which survive as morphological fossils. Let's look at the S-subjunctive, where truncation is particularly striking. The S-subjunctive is formed by strong verbs whose roots end in a dental or vela stop. Here in this formula, this is the final consonant, that's the one that I'm talking about. The root final consonant is replaced by s, finesse, to which the endings are added. This change is usually accompanied by changes to the root vowel as well, which are too diverse to enumerate here. The most consequential changes and the most remarkable forms are found in the third singular conjunct, which also happens to be the most frequent form. It is endingless, in fact even the S of the subjunctive stem is dropped. When the root vowel is stressed, it is lengthened. So for instance the third singular conjunct she may sit from the verb saddith with the root said, where the subjunctive stem is ses, you see that the final s is actually gone here. But when the root vowel is shifted out of stressed position, it is either reduced to a short vowel or dropped altogether. The root is then reduced to the mere initial consonant. So if we look at the next example, folloing, the root is l'h, the subjunctive stem is loss. The third singular under stress is follo, may he or she suffer. But when the root becomes unstressed, it is reduced to a simple follo. Or a spoin has subjunctive stem bos, a spo under stress, unstressed ob. Occasionally the root is completely lost. For instance in the verb konrig, the root is ig, the stressed subjunctive is konri in the third singular. But when unstressed it is koved. All that remains of the root here is the palatalization on the R. Needless to say that these forms are among the most challenging for anyone trying to read an old Irish text. In some future and preterite formations, truncation occurs together with re-duplication, like ririth, or niirir, or ki. So if we look at the example here, the verb gydith, preys, has a root ged, subjunctive stem is ges. In the future stem, this subjunctive stem is re-duplicated to gígíš, will pray, but when it is unstressed we get niigir, will not pray. The only thing that remains of the root is the initial consonant, followed by a zero ending. The last type of root modifications that I want to discuss is really a very mixed bag. I call it root vowel alternations, because that is what happens. Between various stems, especially between the present stem and other stem formations, we find very different vowels inside the root. These vowel changes are the effects of a wide range of varied averse phenomena. They can be the reflex of an Indo-European up-loud, or can be due to laryngeal effects, or to the vocalization of syllabic resonance, or to compensatory lengthening after the loss of fricatives, very latent, primitive Irish, just shortly before the attestation of old Irish, or they can be due to contraction, or simply to analogy, and probably to other reasons which I forgot to mention. The compensatory lengthening and the contraction actually conceal older re-duplication, but because of various sound changes, the re-duplication is lost on the surface, and it looks as if the root vowel had been replaced by a long vowel or a diphthong. Typically examples are gillet here from the present stem glenith in the root glin, or fich, fort, going back to an earlier fich, where you can still see somehow the re-duplication beside the present stem fiches, fights. Beareth, we'll carry at the very bottom here, behaves only as if it had compensatory lengthening as well, but this is really just analogy. We could call all of these cases covert re-duplication in contrast to the overt re-duplication that I showed you before. Having mentioned the subjunctive a couple of times now, let's have a quick look at two lines from the poems of Blathwack, the poems of Blathwack are two very long compositions from the first half of the 8th century. In this couplet, which I've chosen here, you can see four subjunctives from all three different types of subjunctive formation that all of the Irish has, namely the a-subjunctive, the s-subjunctive and the e-subjunctive. So I read the line to you first. Ma rofecheth ffart i me tchisheth kondaradarshe. If you find a place in which he may be, may ye come so that I can adore him? The first subjunctive, rofecheth, is an s-subjunctive to the verb rofinadar, to find out, which actually is built on the root wid. You can see that the d has been replaced by an s and that the root vowel has changed. B is an e-subjunctive of the verb atah, which is first of all subpletive, but even from the subpletive root b, it shows vowel alternation, vowel change. Tchisheth, a subjunctive of doig to come, is built on the root ig and again, the final consonant, the final guh, has been replaced by s and the vowel has been lengthened. The only r-subjunctive here, which is notionally at least the regular formation, is radar, which is the r-subjunctive of the verb adora, to adore, which is built on a pseudo root or, because obviously it's a loan from Latin, adorare. Finally, to each verb belongs a so-called verbal noun that functions as the nominal abstract of the verbal action. Most weak verbs form their verbal nouns with the suffix oth, which inflects as a masculine use stem. For all other verbs, especially the strong verbs, that's here, no rule exists at all as to the formation of the verbal noun. One has to learn them by heart for each single verb. I now want to say a few words about how new verbs are created. In Old Irish, new verbs can be created either through suffix aiton to a non-verbal base or through compounding a verbal base with pre-verbs. This results in a rough dichotomy between suffixed, denominal secondary verbs, which are weak, and prefixed, undirived primary verbs, which are strong. By far the most important suffix for creating new denominal verbs in Old Irish is ach, which inflects as a weak, deponent verb. So if we look at the example here, we have the adjective slán, hóll, safe sound. We add ach to it and we get the deponent verb slánegir, to heal or makes hóll. I have already talked at the beginning about the formation of verbs via suffix aiton of the vocali suffixes long a or long e, to nominal stems. This was productive in the immediate prehistory of Old Irish. Because of the morphophonemic rules of Old Irish, these suffixes do not actually usually appear on the surface, but they leave numerous phono-tactic traces. In the case of primary verbs, new formations are created by completely different means, namely by prefixation or compounding. Compounding means that one or up to four lexical preverbs are stacked unto each other in front of a pre-existing verbal stem or a root, so depending on whether there's already something there, it's already compounded, possibly. The semantic link between the compounded derivative and its base stretches from identity or great proximity to being almost indiscernible. If we look at the first example here, we have the simple verb soid turns from the root so. We can form a compound of that with the preverb indiscernible, we get the verb insoi, which again means turns or returns. And we can then compound that again with another preverb and we get dwindi, which again means simply turns or returns. It's really not clear what the fine semantic differences are between those three verbs. On the other hand, if we look at the verb beneth, strikes with a root b, we can form a compound frispen, literally strikes against, but this means to heal. Or imdiven, to cut off a round, means to circumcise. Or doforben, means to arrive, reach. I wonder why wears the semantic connection between these three compound verbs and the bases. It's really, really tenuous. The propensity for compounding has its roots at least in the common Celtic period, and it intensified in primitive Irish. In this way, information was shifted from the roots towards the preverbs, and the semantic role of roots was depleted in this process. This is on the one hand reflected in the fact that in many synchronic stem alimorphs, the root is no longer visible or is heavily truncated. For instance, in dointi, which you already saw before. The inherited root so has been reduced to a plain devising effect on d, which turns it into the t, and to a schwa, which itself has actually been eclipsed here by the ending e. On the other hand, a diachronic result of this is the reduction of a number of inherited roots and the very high proportion of compound verbs compared with simple verbs. It is also possible to compound verbs with a small set of adverbs. This is not very common, and mainly restricted to stereotyped phrases and to poetic style. I've just chosen a single example from a poem in the single manuscript, again written on the margins of the manuscript. Kind screedem for Roider Ross is the line. I write well under the wooded headland, and screedem is I write, and the well or fine is actually realised as a prefixed adverb. It cannot be easily said when the active creation of new compounds came to a halt, but by the Middle Irish period its productivity had ceased. Around this time, the intricacies of the Irish verbal system are drastically overhauled. The gradual elimination of compound verbs is just one step in this process. While Old Irish mark the distinction between simple and compound verbs morphologically, this dichotomy is eroded through the simultaneous operation of morphology. In the same way, the differentiation of morphological, phonological and syntactic processes. In consequence, previous compounds were reinterpreted as new primary verbs on the basis of either the dependent stem or the verbal noun. Lexicalisation, caused by the lack of phonological and morphological transparency, thus fuelled the demise of prefixation as a living process. This concludes the series about Old Irish morphology. In the next series, my colleague Aaron Griffith will introduce you to the most important aspects of Old Irish syntax and morpho-syntax. At lochor in the Thiftuith. I thank you very much for your attention and I hope that I could pass on a little bit of my own enthusiasm for the Old Irish language onto you.
 Welcome back to the fourth and final session about the morphology of Old Irish.  In this session I will give an overview of the most important processes that lie behind the formation of the tense and mood stems of Old Irish,  verbs and how new verbs can be created. As always, this is only a very rough overview and I will gloss over many subtle sub-rules.  Old Irish displays a fairly clear-cut morphological dichotomy between so-called weak verbs and strong verbs.  In the case of weak verbs, the tense and mood stems are derivable by predictable, productive rules.  There is fundamentally one type of formation for the various tense and mood stems in the weak stems and they are all derived from the defaults present stem.  Strong verbs show a much greater variety of morphological processes and the stem formations are essentially unpredictable.  In most cases, these processes depend on the underlying abstract root shape and the root undergoes various modifications.  Supplation, that is, making use of two or more different lexical roots within a paradigm is not as prominent in Old Irish as one would be inclined to think  if one has been exposed to its verbal system for the first time. But there are actually some remarkable examples, so the simple verb to go  builds on seven or eight different roots or root variants in its paradigm.  In the following, all the reconstructions and underlying roots that I will be using will reflect protochaltic forms unless I specify explicitly protein European reconstructions.  In the prehistory of the language and still in early Old Irish, the verbal system is largely root-based.  By this I mean that the various stems can be derived from an abstract underlying root which usually can be related with an Indo-European root.  However, during the historic period, verbal morphology moves away from this root-based system towards one where the invariant present stem assumes the central rule from which everything else derives,  like it already does with weak verbs in the Old Irish period.  I will now talk about the morphological strategies that can be found in the stem formation of Old Irish verbs.  Suffixation is the strategy that Old Irish weak verbs use almost exclusively.  First of all, this is how many weak verbs are created in the first place.  A suffix is added to a nominal base and turns it into a verb.  For instance, the adjective mor big plus a vocali suffix creates the verb morith to make big, which actually means to praise.  Or rith number plus another suffix creates the verb rith to count.  The stem that is created in this way for the present tense serves then as the basis from which all other tenses and moves are regularly derived.  I will therefore refer to the present stem also as the default stem.  For the subjunctive, another vocali suffix in I is added to the default stem, and therefore it's called our subjunctive.  The f future, the s-pratrate and the pratrate passive are formed in similar ways.  Even the verbal noun is formed in a regular fashion, but not in all cases as you can see from the absence of the vith in this list.  These are the productive stem formations.  During the attested history of the Irish language, these suffixal formations replace most of the other formations that I will discuss from now on.  For strong verbs, suffixation plays only a minor role in the earliest phase of old Irish.  It is important for the formation of the present stem, but note that for strong verbs, the present does not function as a default stem as it does with weak verbs.  The present stem is derived from the root in just the same way as all the other tense and mood stems are derived from it.  The suffixes that we encounter are the well-known ones from other European languages, the eo suffix, the yeo suffix or the suffix ske to name just a few.  Outside of the present stem, the only places where suffixation plays an appreciable role is in the r subjunctive and in the t-pratrate.  The t-pratrate is formed by about 20 verbs which add t to the root to get a pratrate stem, for instance dadith to bull, i.e. to treat a cow like a bull does, which becomes dart, bull.  Historically speaking, this is a novel suffix. The t, the t, was originally the ending of the third person singular, which was reinterpreted as a suffix plus a zero ending.  Far more important for the strong verbs are what I grew up here together as modifications of the root, namely infixation, rejuplication, truncation and vocolic alternations.  Infixation is really only nasal infixation in the present stem of the familiar type known from other Indo-European languages.  The nasal is absent from all other tenses and moods.  In the second example here, the root bal to throw, one can see that the nasal infix has become obscured synchronicly in old Irish and that it surfaces simply as a germination of the double L.  Rejuplication has a much wider functional domain. Even though by the time we get to old Irish, it has already lost a little bit of ground.  Primitive Irish sound changes had depleted the number of forms that show overt rejuplication and have transferred them to morphological types that I will discuss in a minute.  When I speak about rejuplication now, I'm chiefly concerned actually with overt rejuplication.  Rejuplication plays no longer any role in the formation of present stems.  There are just two verbs that show fossilized, obscured rejuplication historically speaking, but synchronicly the rejuplication is no longer realized as such.  These are Ivid grinks from Indo-European Piprachty and Arshishidar stays remains from Sistach.  In future formations, rejuplication is very common. The rejuplicating vowel is I, but it can appear in various guises on the surface.  Since rejuplication means that an extra syllable is added to the word, it automatically entails synchroby of the following syllable.  As a consequence, the vowel of the original root is lost.  Typical examples are ganithir is born from the root gen, which becomes guernithir.  The root itself is the gln here in the middle. The gui is the rejuplicating syllable.  Or the rid they will sell. What remains of the root is actually the R here in the middle from the root li compared with the present stem reynith.  Or kechna, again the root is kan, rejuplicated here as kechna, with a chn being the root part.  In those preterates that make use of rejuplication, the main type uses a as a rejuplicating vowel.  For instance the first plural, lellramer, we likt from lirith to lik.  But there are a lot of other variants besides such as i, we have here kech from keith, or o in lollich from inline from the root lung.  And a relative kechne, husang from the root kan, in the verb kanith to sing.  Root truncation is probably the most astonishing method of stem formation.  Like so many other things of the grammatical behaviour of old Irish, truncation is the reflex of phonological reductions that happened in primitive Irish and which survive as morphological fossils.  Let's look at the S-subjunctive, where truncation is particularly striking.  The S-subjunctive is formed by strong verbs whose roots end in a dental or vela stop.  Here in this formula, this is the final consonant, that's the one that I'm talking about.  The root final consonant is replaced by s, finesse, to which the endings are added.  This change is usually accompanied by changes to the root vowel as well, which are too diverse to enumerate here.  The most consequential changes and the most remarkable forms are found in the third singular conjunct, which also happens to be the most frequent form.  It is endingless, in fact even the S of the subjunctive stem is dropped.  When the root vowel is stressed, it is lengthened.  So for instance the third singular conjunct she may sit from the verb saddith with the root said,  where the subjunctive stem is ses, you see that the final s is actually gone here.  But when the root vowel is shifted out of stressed position, it is either reduced to a short vowel or dropped altogether.  The root is then reduced to the mere initial consonant.  So if we look at the next example, folloing, the root is l'h, the subjunctive stem is loss.  The third singular under stress is follo, may he or she suffer.  But when the root becomes unstressed, it is reduced to a simple follo.  Or a spoin has subjunctive stem bos, a spo under stress, unstressed ob.  Occasionally the root is completely lost.  For instance in the verb konrig, the root is ig, the stressed subjunctive is konri in the third singular.  But when unstressed it is koved.  All that remains of the root here is the palatalization on the R.  Needless to say that these forms are among the most challenging for anyone trying to read an old Irish text.  In some future and preterite formations, truncation occurs together with re-duplication, like ririth, or niirir, or ki.  So if we look at the example here, the verb gydith, preys, has a root ged, subjunctive stem is ges.  In the future stem, this subjunctive stem is re-duplicated to gígíš, will pray, but when it is unstressed we get niigir, will not pray.  The only thing that remains of the root is the initial consonant, followed by a zero ending.  The last type of root modifications that I want to discuss is really a very mixed bag.  I call it root vowel alternations, because that is what happens.  Between various stems, especially between the present stem and other stem formations, we find very different vowels inside the root.  These vowel changes are the effects of a wide range of varied averse phenomena.  They can be the reflex of an Indo-European up-loud, or can be due to laryngeal effects, or to the vocalization of syllabic resonance,  or to compensatory lengthening after the loss of fricatives, very latent, primitive Irish, just shortly before the attestation of old Irish,  or they can be due to contraction, or simply to analogy, and probably to other reasons which I forgot to mention.  The compensatory lengthening and the contraction actually conceal older re-duplication,  but because of various sound changes, the re-duplication is lost on the surface,  and it looks as if the root vowel had been replaced by a long vowel or a diphthong.  Typically examples are gillet here from the present stem glenith in the root glin,  or fich, fort, going back to an earlier fich, where you can still see somehow the re-duplication beside the present stem fiches, fights.  Beareth, we'll carry at the very bottom here, behaves only as if it had compensatory lengthening as well, but this is really just analogy.  We could call all of these cases covert re-duplication in contrast to the overt re-duplication that I showed you before.  Having mentioned the subjunctive a couple of times now, let's have a quick look at two lines from the poems of Blathwack,  the poems of Blathwack are two very long compositions from the first half of the 8th century.  In this couplet, which I've chosen here, you can see four subjunctives from all three different types of subjunctive formation that all of the Irish has,  namely the a-subjunctive, the s-subjunctive and the e-subjunctive.  So I read the line to you first.  Ma rofecheth ffart i me tchisheth kondaradarshe. If you find a place in which he may be, may ye come so that I can adore him?  The first subjunctive, rofecheth, is an s-subjunctive to the verb rofinadar, to find out, which actually is built on the root wid.  You can see that the d has been replaced by an s and that the root vowel has changed.  B is an e-subjunctive of the verb atah, which is first of all subpletive, but even from the subpletive root b, it shows vowel alternation, vowel change.  Tchisheth, a subjunctive of doig to come, is built on the root ig and again, the final consonant, the final guh, has been replaced by s and the vowel has been lengthened.  The only r-subjunctive here, which is notionally at least the regular formation, is radar, which is the r-subjunctive of the verb adora, to adore, which is built on a pseudo root or, because obviously it's a loan from Latin, adorare.  Finally, to each verb belongs a so-called verbal noun that functions as the nominal abstract of the verbal action.  Most weak verbs form their verbal nouns with the suffix oth, which inflects as a masculine use stem.  For all other verbs, especially the strong verbs, that's here, no rule exists at all as to the formation of the verbal noun.  One has to learn them by heart for each single verb.  I now want to say a few words about how new verbs are created.  In Old Irish, new verbs can be created either through suffix aiton to a non-verbal base or through compounding a verbal base with pre-verbs.  This results in a rough dichotomy between suffixed, denominal secondary verbs, which are weak, and prefixed, undirived primary verbs, which are strong.  By far the most important suffix for creating new denominal verbs in Old Irish is ach, which inflects as a weak, deponent verb.  So if we look at the example here, we have the adjective slán, hóll, safe sound.  We add ach to it and we get the deponent verb slánegir, to heal or makes hóll.  I have already talked at the beginning about the formation of verbs via suffix aiton of the vocali suffixes long a or long e, to nominal stems.  This was productive in the immediate prehistory of Old Irish.  Because of the morphophonemic rules of Old Irish, these suffixes do not actually usually appear on the surface, but they leave numerous phono-tactic traces.  In the case of primary verbs, new formations are created by completely different means, namely by prefixation or compounding.  Compounding means that one or up to four lexical preverbs are stacked unto each other in front of a pre-existing verbal stem or a root, so depending on whether there's already something there, it's already compounded, possibly.  The semantic link between the compounded derivative and its base stretches from identity or great proximity to being almost indiscernible.  If we look at the first example here, we have the simple verb soid turns from the root so.  We can form a compound of that with the preverb indiscernible, we get the verb insoi, which again means turns or returns.  And we can then compound that again with another preverb and we get dwindi, which again means simply turns or returns.  It's really not clear what the fine semantic differences are between those three verbs.  On the other hand, if we look at the verb beneth, strikes with a root b, we can form a compound frispen, literally strikes against, but this means to heal.  Or imdiven, to cut off a round, means to circumcise.  Or doforben, means to arrive, reach.  I wonder why wears the semantic connection between these three compound verbs and the bases.  It's really, really tenuous.  The propensity for compounding has its roots at least in the common Celtic period, and it intensified in primitive Irish.  In this way, information was shifted from the roots towards the preverbs, and the semantic role of roots was depleted in this process.  This is on the one hand reflected in the fact that in many synchronic stem alimorphs, the root is no longer visible or is heavily truncated.  For instance, in dointi, which you already saw before.  The inherited root so has been reduced to a plain devising effect on d, which turns it into the t, and to a schwa, which itself has actually been eclipsed here by the ending e.  On the other hand, a diachronic result of this is the reduction of a number of inherited roots and the very high proportion of compound verbs compared with simple verbs.  It is also possible to compound verbs with a small set of adverbs.  This is not very common, and mainly restricted to stereotyped phrases and to poetic style.  I've just chosen a single example from a poem in the single manuscript, again written on the margins of the manuscript.  Kind screedem for Roider Ross is the line.  I write well under the wooded headland, and screedem is I write, and the well or fine is actually realised as a prefixed adverb.  It cannot be easily said when the active creation of new compounds came to a halt, but by the Middle Irish period its productivity had ceased.  Around this time, the intricacies of the Irish verbal system are drastically overhauled.  The gradual elimination of compound verbs is just one step in this process.  While Old Irish mark the distinction between simple and compound verbs morphologically, this dichotomy is eroded through the simultaneous operation of morphology.  In the same way, the differentiation of morphological, phonological and syntactic processes.  In consequence, previous compounds were reinterpreted as new primary verbs on the basis of either the dependent stem or the verbal noun.  Lexicalisation, caused by the lack of phonological and morphological transparency, thus fuelled the demise of prefixation as a living process.  This concludes the series about Old Irish morphology.  In the next series, my colleague Aaron Griffith will introduce you to the most important aspects of Old Irish syntax and morpho-syntax.  At lochor in the Thiftuith. I thank you very much for your attention and I hope that I could pass on a little bit of my own enthusiasm for the Old Irish language onto you.
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