Hi!
I Gaelic, there are the diminutive suffixes -ín, -án and other. Are there Gaelic (Old and modern) augmentative suffixes? I could not find any in my searches.
Any advice is welcome

There are prefixes like an-, rí, oll- or mór-

But no augmentative suffixes?

Strictly speaking, yes, ín and án are Gaelic diminutive suffixes, but more specifically they are the Irish Gaelic and Old Irish diminutive suffixes. Scottish Gaelic has ag/eag and an/ean. Of these, only the former is still productive in Scottish Gaelic. The latter might be equated to án, which was used widely in Old Irish but is no longer productive in Modern Irish.



Irish doesn't have an augmentative suffix comparable to that of, for example, Spanish. The Spanish suffix is derived ultimately from the Latin augmentative suffix. It was always in the language and evolved over time into the suffix which is still used in the modern language. To my knowledge, no comparable augmentative element, be it a lexeme or an affix, exists in the Gaelic language family aside from the adjective mór "big/great". The diminutive suffix, by contrast, can be traced back to the earliest writings in Irish. It occurs in Primitive Irish inscriptions in the form AGNAS which developed into Old Irish án. This diminutive is distinct from the adjective beag (Old Irish becc) "small/little", which exists alongside it throughout the written record of Irish.

When something akin to an augmentative suffix is required in Irish to express greatness or largeness, the adjective mór tends to be used. Kings or military leaders would often be given the epithet mór, for example, Domnall Mór Ua Briain = 'Donall "the Great" O'Brien'. As Labhrás has already mentioned, mór- can also be used as a prefix, and this usage is perhaps more comparable to the usage of the the diminutive suffix in Irish, as opposed to instances where the adjective beag "small" would be used instead. The prefix mór- can also become lexicalised in Gaelic words, like the diminutive suffix, in a way that is uncommon for adjectives mór and beag. For example, Old Irish mórfesser "seven" (lit. "great-six") and Modern Irish mórbhealach "highway" (lit. "great road") might be contrasted against cailín "a girl" = caile + -ín (lit. "a little country woman" or "a little maid"). As such, mór probably comes closest to fulfilling the same linguistic niche as an augmentative suffix, but resembles it more as a prefix than in its usual position as an adjective, following the noun.



Because you asked in your opening post about augmentative suffixes in both old and modern forms of Gaelic, it's worth noting that what makes something a suffix isn't necessarily its philological development. It's got more to do with syntax and orthographic convention, i.e. if an element occurs immediately following a noun, and without spacing separating it from the noun, then it's a suffix. It's hardly a coincidence given their etymologies that the diminutive suffixes in Irish and Spanish, as well as the augmentative suffix in Spanish, came to be conventionally written as suffixes in the orthographies of the two languages, but it's the fact that they follow nouns in writing, and are not spaced apart from those preceding nouns, that makes them suffixes, not their etymologies.

The reason this is worth mentioning in the context of "Gaelic (Old and modern)", is that the standardisation of spacing between words, and hence what constitutes a "word" as opposed to a "suffix", is a more recent development than the simple use of spacing to break up a text. Conventions which dictate that a space must occur between some lexical elements (like a noun and an adjective) but not between others (like a noun and a diminutive or augmentative) are only really formalised rules in the writing systems of modern languages (at least in a European context). Spacing in Old Irish manuscripts, by contrast, was inconsistent at best. While some general observations might be made about how spacing was applied between certain lexical elements in a relatively consistent manner, there wasn't really any concept that a text was ungrammatical or incorrectly written if specific lexical elements weren't written with space separating them, like with words in modern texts. Because adjectives typically follow nouns in Irish syntax, if a space was omitted between the two in writing it may appear that mór, or some variant spelling of mór, was acting like an augmentative suffix, while if spacing was used between the two, it would look like a regular adjective.

As it happens, examples do occur in manuscript sources where mór (or some spelling variant thereof) follows a noun without being spaced apart from it. An example occurs in the Old Irish Würzburg glosses (13c23) where the text, .i.co[m]bidiassmór indóengránne "i.e. so that a great ear (of corn) comes from the single grain", is written with virtually no spacing separating in the manuscript. In another Old Irish example, this time from the St. Gall glosses (9a8), the text ḟog[uir]máir "great/loud sound" occurs with no spacing separating máir (= mór) from the preceding noun. Editors of modern editions often alter the spacing in texts like these to make them appear more like they might be expected to in modern orthographies, however, in the manuscripts themselves where no spacing occurs between mór (or its spelling variants) and the preceding noun, it might conceivably be argued to represent an augmentative suffix because of its syntactic placement and lack of spacing. A more reasonable argument though, at least in my opinion, would be that the concept of an augmentative suffix is only valid in modern languages for which formal orthographic rules occur which govern the syntactic placement and spacing of the augmentative element from a noun.

EDIT: to fix the spelling of Old Irish becc.

@Ade thank you for the detailed reply, rich with interesting information and quotes from medieval sources. I will investigate this further. On your knowledge, ancient Gaelic never had any augmentatives like -ion (Brittonic) and -onos (Gaulish)? There aren't any possible traces on this?

Also, you make a good point on the using of the term suffix only for modern languages. It is very interesting to note that in Old Irish the augmentative mor (máir) was used also at the end of the noun without any space between the two words.

On a separate subject, Could perhaps the Gaelic adjective beach (small) stem from Proto-Celtic *bekko?

Thurneysen (A Grammar of Old Irish, 1946, pp. 173-175) gives a considerable discussion of various diminutives which can be found in Old Irish sources, but doesn't address augmentatives at all as far as I can see. The same is true of McManus (A Guide to Ogam. 1991, pp. 107-108) who dedicates an entire section (§6.12) to diminutives in ogham inscriptions, and claims that "Diminutives in -AGNI > -AN(N) ... formed from both nouns and adjectives are particularly common", but doesn't seem to mention augmentatives at all (unless I've missed it somewhere). He does have a section on miscellaneous suffixes (§6.13), any one of which could possibly have been augmentative I suppose, however, he doesn't provide an interpretation for any of them as far as I can see, and I'm not inclined to draw any meaningful comparisons between any of them and augmentatives in related languages myself.

It's tempting to suspect that there must have been augmentatives in the language if they can be found in closely related British or Gaulish sources, but the best I can do based on my current knowledge is to say I don't know of any augmentative suffixes in Gaelic, and they're not very readily apparent in the literature either.

As an aside, both Thurneysen and McManus list several diminutives which haven't been mentioned in earlier comments, so you might be interested in looking into these. Most of them have ceased to be productive long before the Modern Irish period, but of course, they would have been at one point in the history of the language.



Actually, this position, following the noun, is the typical placement for adjectives in Irish. This is partly why I said the prefixing of mor- to a noun seems more akin to an augmentative. So, it's not so much the placement I was commenting on (though obviously it plays a role), but the use of separation by spacing. While word order is a factor which is built into the grammar of a language, separation of words by spacing is a matter of orthographic convention. Just look at the way nouns are compounded in German, but not in other European languages. It's easy to overlook the fact that whether a lexical element is considered a suffix or an adjective (assuming the element in question occurs syntactically in the same position, following the noun) is actually based on writing convention surrounding whitespace for a language, but is not necessarily baked into the grammar of the language.



Just a minor note before I try to answer; beach, with lenited final c would more likely have been read as the noun meaning "bee" in Old Irish. The common use of double c in Old Irish becc "small" (Note: I've just edited my post above to reflect this), and the fact that the sound remains unlenited in modern Irish beag, both strongly suggest that the final consonant of the adjective would never have sounded like you might expect if written beach during the Old Irish period.

As to your question, I'll start by admitting that I'm no expert in either Proto-Celtic or Proto-Indo-European reconstructions, so the best I can do is point you to more authoritative sources. Take any conjecture I might offer as just guesswork on my part based on what these sources say.

The entry on Wiktionary suggests the reconstruction *biggos, with *bekkos and *beggos being possible alternatives. Keep in mind, though, that these are merely reconstructions, so it's more accurate to say that any of these Proto-Celtic forms stem from Old Irish becc, along with cognates surviving in other Celtic languages.

Stifter (Sengoidelc, 2006, p. 64) tells us that Old Irish becc is an ā-stem adjective, and that "The ā-stem adjectives are identical in inflection with the ā-stem nouns." Here follows some of that conjecture I mentioned above. I'm inclined to believe that, if the inflections of the ā-stem adjectives are identical to those of the ā-stem nouns, this probably results from them having historically shared the same Proto-Celtic or Proto-Indo-European stems as those nouns, and having therefore been affected by the processes of syncope and apocope in a similar manner. Stifter doesn't offer reconstructions of the adjectives to back up my suspicion, but he does offer Proto-Celtic reconstructions of the ā-stem nouns (p. 59). Here, only the accusative and vocative plural forms end in s, with the nominative singular ending in the long ā from which the stem-class gets its name. If I were made to reconstruct a Proto-Celtic form of becc in the nominative singular, based on this information I would be inclined to reconstruct *bekā. I suspect the reconstructions with final -os are based on agreement between the adjective and a masculine noun which would have historically ended in -s. Perhaps this is common practice in Proto-Celtic reconstructions, or perhaps my assumption that the ā-stem adjectives shared the same historical stems as ā-stem nouns is just incorrect.

@Ade thank you very much. I will delve into the very interesting leads and information you shared.