Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-sd5qd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-07T13:49:26.409Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Old Irish -icc, -ucci

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Nils M. Holmer
Nils M. Holmer*
Affiliation:
University of Uppsala, Sweden
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Old Irish -icc ‘reach, attain’, which does not exist as a simple verb in any Celtic language, has usually been connected with Skt. aśnoti ‘reaches’; more particularly it should be comparable to the augmentless form of the aorist. The chief reason for upholding this theory is the close affinity between the perfect forms of this verb in Celtic and Sanskrit: OIr. -ánicc and Skr. ānaṃśa. The vowel in the present-tense form in Old Irish has caused some difficulty and has been variously explained (see VG 752, Anm. 3; Pokorny, Altir. Gramm. 48, and IF 35.339). The only possible explanation seems to be that we have here a case of shortening in unstressed position. The expected stressed forms would be: 3d sg. *-éicc, 3d pl. *-éccat, which became, as stress was lost in context, -ice and -eccat respectively. In the same way one finds OIr. lécimm ‘I leave, let’ appearing as leigim and ligim (seldom léigim) in the modern Irish (and Scottish Gaelic) dialects. The influence of numerous compounds (ni·aricc ‘does not find’ etc.) must also be taken into consideration in order to explain the final victory of the forms with a short vowel. The original Celtic form corresponding to OIr. -icc may therefore have been (3d sg. pres. ind.) *anket, which in Goidelic changes its a into e (and i) before the nasal consonant cluster.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 24 , Issue 3-Part1: July-September , September 1948 , pp. 262 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © 1948 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 For the abbreviations used in this paper, see Holmer, Postvocalic s in Insular Celtic, Lang. 23.125 n. 1 (1947).

2 A more serious objection to the theory advanced here would be that also the pres. subj. (3d sg. -í, 3d pl. -íssat) and the verbal noun (-íchtu), which always have a long vowel, show ī instead of ē. It is, however, not unlikely that these forms may be comparatively late, and modeled on the pres. ind., especially as the regular subj. form of ticc ‘comes’, viz. *té ‘shall come’, would be homophonous with 'té 'shall go' (from tíag-, téig-). The regular evolution may be found in téchte ‘right, proper, suitable, legitimate’, which might (in spite of VG I, p. 124) be the original past participle of ticc ‘comes’ (as forcm-achte, from *for-com-icc); for the meaning, cf. Mod. Ir. tig liom ‘it suits me, I can’. A different though hardly more convincing explanation of the long í has been advanced by Thurneysen (IF Anzeiger, p. 17).

3 There is no trace in Celtic of a formative -eje-, corresponding to the Skt. -aya-. Most verbs with o as their root vowel, which correspond to IE causatives (or denominatives), show an ī in the suffix (often with umlaut): Corn. lesky, lysky, Breton leski ‘burn’ (but Welsh llosgi), from (Welsh) llosg ‘burning’.

4 This also brings in OIr. tucu, tuccim ‘I understand’, which Pedersen (VG 665.10) identifies with tucci ‘brings’. The relation between them is the same as between English ‘get’ and ‘understand’: OIr. tucu originally means ‘I cause it to reach me’, while English has ‘I get it’. As verbal noun tabairt ‘giving, bringing’ is used (as in Ml 107.c.16).

5 As also Middle Irish tuicsiu, from tuccim ‘I understand’, probably formed on aicsiu ‘seeing’.

6 As for -ing instead of -icc, cf. cuming to con·icc ‘can’, cumang and cumacc (given by Zeuss-Ebel, Thurneysen, and Hessen), vb.n.

7 It is active, however, in Wb 8.a.14, as Dr. Bergin has kindly pointed out to me.

8 So also in Hessen, Irisches Lexikon.

9 Cf. offenderunt enim in lapidem offensionis, in the lemma.

10 Perhaps correctly brosnada ‘faggots, firewood’, as the rime is chosnoda.

11 The alleged or actual sense of 'strike, cut (off)' (cf. Fél. Oeng. Epil. 7: conecmingsem, gl. robensam; Laud, 610) is possibly due to the influence of another verb: conboing 'break', which in certain forms resembles the verb ·ecming; this also has induced Kuno Meyer (Contributions) to enter all forms of ·ccming in which the sense seems to be ‘strike’ or ‘cut’ under an imaginary verb adcombongim.

12 According to Pedersen (LP 422.5) the ng-forms represent an ‘auxiliary root’ ang-.

13 ‘perhaps to Gothic briggan‘ (LP, p. 40).

14 In like manner the OIr. verbal noun to the ī-verb slundi- ‘signify’ is slond, to which slondod is later formed.