Some of you may remember this post, where I was describing how I was translating an Old Irish poem. Well, I was not doing it right (this is not surprising really). I mistook the emphatic first person singular pronoun messe with the comparative of the adjective olc, meaning bad, which is messu.
I want to explain how I got it wrong. I thought the end vowel was changed in transmission. This happens often at the end of the Old Irish period and is called "final vowel schwa", which basically means that they final vowels in Old Irish were giving way to new final vowels that occur in Middle Irish. So I thought that messe gave way to *messu rather than just being an irregular comparative of olc. So mo olc, "my bad".
posted by Chris #2:20 PM | 0 comments |
