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This paper intends to study the history of the Old Irish word aue ‘descendant, grandchild’ in both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The former approach tries to demonstrate what forms this word evolved into from the early Old Irish period up to the end of the Middle Irish period, and to establish the phonological changes it underwent in accordance with our present understanding of the history of the Irish language. The latter approach is based on a linguistically annotated corpus of the Annals of Ulster, and shows the distribution of variant forms of aue in relation to the period they are attested in. The discrepancy between the two observations is discussed and various hypotheses are raised to explain it.

This article presents hitherto overlooked evidence that suggests that the Old Irish word for the ‘apple’, ubull, was originally a neuter u-stem. This is then integrated into a general picture of the words for ‘apple’ in Celtic and Indo-European. Along the way, several other problems are discussed: it is demonstrated that the normal, if not regular, genitive plural of neuter u-stems in Old Irish had the ending -Ø; the rules for the operation of MacNeill’s Law after b /β/ are refined; and the question of the regular reflex of *su̯ in Old Irish is investigated.

A subject analysis of oblique subject-like arguments remains controversial even across modern languages where the available data are not finite: while such arguments are considered syntactic subjects in Icelandic, they have more often been analyzed as objects in Lithuanian, for example. This issue has been left relatively neglected for the ancient Indo-European languages outside of Sanskrit (Hock 1990), Gothic (Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012), and Ancient Greek (Danesi 2015). In this article, we address the status of oblique subject-like arguments in Old Irish, whose strict word-order enables us to compare the position (relative to the verb and other arguments) of nominative subject arguments of the canonical type to oblique subject-like arguments. We first establish a baseline for neutral word-order of nominative subjects and accusative objects and then compare their distribution to that of oblique subject-like arguments under two conditions: i) on a subject analysis and ii) on an object analysis. The word-order distribution differs significantly across the two contexts when the oblique arguments are analyzed as syntactic objects, but not when they are analyzed as syntactic subjects. These findings add to the growing evidence that oblique subject-like arguments should be analyzed as syntactic subjects, although their coding properties are non-canonical.

Old Irish inherited the PIE root noun *doms ~ dm̥- ‘home’, which is reflected chiefly in the fixed locution [Verb of motion] dia daim ‘(go) to (one’s) home’. From the remnants of this ablauting, feminine root noun speakers created a somewhat anomalous i-stem, doim, doma. In addition Old Irish probably inherited a thematic masculine *domos continued mainly in the collocation dom/dam liac ‘house of stone, cathedral’, though the possibility of a Latin loan cannot be entirely excluded. A further trace of the root noun *dom- ~ *dm̥- is seen in déis ‘clientele’, which continues *dm̥-sth2i- ‘located in the house’. This proto-form, suggested by de Bernardo Stempel (NWÄI), has a close formal match in Lith. dimstis ‘courtyard’ and is reminiscent of Lat. domesticus ‘of the household’. This Latin form is shown to be of prehistoric origin despite its relatively late date of attestation. The possibility is explored that domesticus may be a remodeled reflex of the same compound inherited by Old Irish and Lithuanian, although domesticus may also be an inner-Latin formation.