Hey, long time reader first time poster

I've been reading up about some primitive Irish and Ogham inscriptions lately, simply because it's pretty cool stuff.
Anyway I've come across a bunch of common formula inscriptions, such as:

X MAQI Y (X son of Y)
X MAQI MUCOI Y (X son of the tribe Y)
X MAQI Y MUCOI Z (X son of Y of the tribe Z)

A lot of these words have modern versions such as Maqi becoming Mac, but I can't seem to find a modern version of Mucoi (of the tribe), does anyone know of any modernisation or equivalent in modern or older Irish?

Tá for any response

To my knowledge that word no longer exists in Modern Irish. It does however exist in Old Irish as Maccu/ Moccu:

Dictionary of the Irish Language (Old and Middle Irish ): http://edil.qub.ac.uk/dictionary/index2 ... =edil_2012

There's also some references to a few readings on the word Maccu/Moccu in that link if you are interested.

If you want to know more about Irish Nomenclature in general, I would recommend Eoin /John Mac Neill's very detailed article:

'Early Irish Population-Groups: Their Nomenclature, Classification, and Chronology', Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 29 (1911/1912) 59-114.

Its available on JSTOR, if you have access to it!

Edit: Just found it free online here:

http://www.archive.org/stream/proceedin ... 3/mode/2up

and here:

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E900000-003/



Cian

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

I don't think one exists. I can't even find a likely cognate in Old Irish.

Oh tá! thank's for that

MAQI became mic, both are genitive forms.

nominative: MAQOS / mac

No expert here, but that looks like a case of umlaut (sound shift), which happens in a lot of languages (not just with genitive forms), where grammatical differences can be indicated by the first vowel taking on the sound of the following vowel (or becoming a mixture of the sounds). That sort of change is why in English we now have "man" as the singular and "men" as the plural. The shift is easier to see in German, where Mann ["mahn"] becomes Männer ["menner"] (English lost the ending in the course of its development).

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Maybe, though I have also heard that the slenderisation of the o-stems (1st declension) in the genitive is a result of the genitiving force of the -I- that occurs on the pre-apocopated and pre-syncopated nouns of the same stem in Primitive Irish, e.g. MAQ(Q)I.

MAQQOS is definitely considered to be the nominative form in primitive Irish.

Cian

_________________

Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

Actually, what you say may be correct, and I misstated how umlaut works/worked (at least in German). Using the German example, when Mann was pluralized as "Manner" (or something like that, originally), the "e" sound was "anticipated" by speakers, and came to color the "a" sound and result in the umlaut. So, as with séimhiú and urú in Irish, the sound changes came first, as simply a result of (rapid) everyday speech, and only acquired a grammatical aspect much later, once the Germanic speaking peoples had settled down and acquired writing and the concept that they even had a grammar. One interesting aspect of the Germanic languages is that, while the West Germanic (German, Dutch, English, etc.) and North Germanic (Scandinavian) languages all developed umlaut sounds, it apparently never happened in the (now extinct) Gothic branch of the family.

_________________
I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

It has nothing to do with the acquisition of writing and everything to do with the loss of the conditioning environment. Take Old English, for example. It's the first West Germanic vernacular to be written and we find umlaut alternations already in place in the earliest texts. The plural of Old English fót "foot", for instance, is written fét, with no trace of the second syllable responsible for the change. (The reconstructed Common Germanic forms are, respectively, *fōts and *fōtiz.) Remember that at the time, the vast majority of English-speakers were completely illiterate. They had no more notion of how these nouns were being rendered in writing that you would have of what they look like in binary.

Confusingly, the Old High German plural of man was actually man. It wasn't until later that it was treated like an i-stem and pluralised men and later still that it adopted the -er plural ending from the neuter z-declension. (An example of noun which etymologically belongs to this declension is lamb, plural lembir. [Mod. Ger. Lamm, Lämmer.]) That's one of the fun things about umlaut in Germanic: it goes rapidly from being a phonetic peculiarity of certain declensions to a grammatical alternation which gets extended by analogy. It's also fun to compare what happens in different branches. Swedish, for instance, didn't get nearly as carried away in this respect as German. Man pluralises to män and fot to fötter, but the plural of lamm is lamm, not *lämmer.

Just to be clear, I didn't say that umlaut had anything to do with the acquisition of writing, just that the concept of grammar was not something which the pre-literate Germanic speakers thought about.

As in German, extension of sound changes to situations where they did not originally occur also happened in Irish. For example, eclipsis now occurs after the number 8 (ocht), by analogy to what happens with the numbers 7, 9, and 10, even though the number 8 did not originally end in a nasal sound (which is what caused eclipsis originally).

_________________
I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.