jsbtcom wrote:
Hi!
I Gaelic, there are the diminutive suffixes -ín, -án and other.
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.
jsbtcom wrote:
But no augmentative suffixes?
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.
jsbtcom wrote:
Are there Gaelic (Old and modern) augmentative suffixes? I could not find any in my searches.
Any advice is welcome
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.