Fada – the long and the short of it

Fada – the long and the short of it So far in this blog I have proposed a number of etymologies for fairly common Irish words as loan-words from Latin or from some early Hispanic dialect of Romance: álainn ‘beautiful’, áit ‘place, dwelling’, áth ‘ford’, bán ‘white; lea-land, grassy’, cairthe/coirthe ‘standing stone’ and odhar ‘brown/grey’. I’ve suggested that these words form part of an input to the Irish language which has previously gone unnoticed by and large, at least as a cohesive phenomenon. That early medieval Irish borrowed many Latin words is, of course, well-known and undisputed, but these are mainly connected with the arrival of Christianity and were often transmitted through Brittonic, as can be seen from the phonological characteristics of words such as póg ‘kiss’ < (osculum) pacis, paidir ‘prayer’ < pater (noster), sagart ‘priest’ < sacderdos, gen. sacerdotis and pobal ‘people, congregation, community’ < populus (see Appendix in Thurneysen’s A Grammar of Old Irish, pp. 565-76). The words which I’ve highlighted, by contrast, can be regarded secular loans, having no specific connection with religion or church infrastructure, with the possible exception of cairthe/coirthe, which may be connected with ritual, though probably with pagan ritual. They also show no Brittonic phonological characteristics, such as the Brittonic lenition seen in póg, etc. Rather they sometimes show Hispanic characteristics, such as Latin v > b in vanus > bán (think of the Spanish pronunciation of vale or Valencia, as if written with initial b-), or they seem to be related specifically to Hispanic Romance vocabulary, e.g. álainn, cf. Spanish/Portuguese lindo. Some of these words are more strongly represented in the place-names of southern Ireland, such as bán, especially in the sense ‘lea-land, grassy’. As a simple colour reference, ‘white’, it contrasts with its Celtic synonym fionn, which has a Welsh cognate in gwyn/gwen and is more widespread in the northern half of Ireland (see the distribution maps at logainm.ie: https://www.logainm.ie/ga/gls/b/ and https://www.logainm.ie/ga/gls/f/). Fionn is also much more common in close compounds than bán, another indicator that the latter is a non-Celtic relative newcomer. I will be dealing with other elements place-name elements such as ladhar and féith, which fit into this group and show more marked southern coastal distributions. I want to acknowledge the work of a friend and colleague for setting me on this track. Although I never met him, I was in regular correspondence for several years with the late Dr. Alan Mac an Bhaird, who had emigrated to Andorra after working for a number of years as a place-names officer with the Ordnance Survey in Dublin. I heard him aptly described by Dónall Mac Giolla Easpaig as the unofficial Irish cultural attaché to Andorra. He suggested Hispanic links for several Irish words which previously lacked convincing etymologies, such as fairrge ‘sea’, which he compares with Castilian Spanish barranco ‘ravine, gorge’ in his work A Checklist of Proto-Celtic Lexical Items (https://www.scribd.com/doc/20623905/A-Checklist-of-Proto-Celtic-Lexical-Items). It is common for words denoting deeply cut landforms to double as words for the open sea, the connection being the sense ‘deep’ (think of Eng. ‘the deep’). Old Irish ocían < Lat. oceanus is used of the sea, but has also yielded Modern Irish aigeán, ‘precipice, abyss, steep slope’. However, this time around I want to take a look at a word which is part of a different phenomenon, namely fada, ‘long’. Just as this group of loanwords from Latin/Romance with a vector from South-Western Europe direct to southern Ireland (largely bypassing Britain) has been overlooked, there is another very important aspect of the linguistic context that is also frequently overlooked or under-estimated, the other side of the coin if you will. This is the input of words from Brittonic into Irish. Art Ó Maolfabhail, former Chief Placenames Officer with the Ordnance Survey, explored this topic in depth in his article “Ar Lorg na Breatnaise in Éirinn” in Ainm VIII (2000), showing that there has been a flow of vocabulary of words from Brittonic to Irish all the way from prehistoric times to the modern era. However, it was T.F. O’Rahilly who made the boldest assertions about Brittonic influence on Irish, arguing in Early Irish History and Mythology (1946) that 4 distinct waves of Celtic speakers arriving in Ireland could be discerned through language, history and mythology, but only the last of these had been Goidelic speakers, the other three (Cruithin, Ivernians or Fir Bolg and Laighin) being Brittonic speakers. I think this idea is probably overcooked and the detail may be much less clear-cut than O’Rahilly’s version, but I believe the basic notion of a Brittonic linguistic layer, present in late prehistoric and early Christian Ireland, is sound (rather than mere borrowing across the Irish Sea by cultural contact). Unfortunately, O’Rahilly gave very little evidence from etymology and place-names to support these ideas, though I would argue that the evidence exists in abundance. As is often the case, I begin with a gripe about how etymologists have handled the word fada. If you check MacBain, you will see that he derives the Old Irish form fota, and, fot, ‘length’, (both with written t pronounced as /d/) from a reconstructed Proto-IE root *vad-dho- or vaz-dho-, querying a possible connection with Latin vastus, ‘vast’.  A geminate consonant or a consonant cluster is necessary to explain the unlenited -d- in fada (N.B. unlenited in terms of Irish lenition). In essence, this explanation is repeated by Pokorny and Matasović. It is not covered by the Lexique Étymologique de l’Irlandais Ancien, because the letter F has not yet been published in this project. So far, this looks fair enough in terms of phonology, and semantically it is easy to see how an Irish word meaning ‘long, far’ could be related to a Latin word that gives us Eng. vast. However, it should be noted that the primary meaning of the Latin word is ‘empty, deserted, desert, waste’. My real problem with this etymology is that Lat. vastus is also wheeled out by the same etymologists to explain Ir. fás meaning ‘empty, deserted’. Now, it is quite possible for the same root to yield two or more different words if one is a cognate and another a loan, or if the loans occur in different periods or via different dialects. This explains why English has both cattle and chattle from different forms of French, ultimately from Latin capitulum. However, if one wants to advocate such multiple etymologies from the same ultimate sources, one needs to flag this up and explain how the distinction arises, whereas this is all kept hush hush in our usual sources. In reality, Latin vastus works semantically much better as the source of a loan for Ir. fás and rather less well for Ir. fada. The next step is prompted by the observation that fada, whilst being a very common Irish adjective, is not found in close-compound place-names. At all. Full stop. If you know of any examples, I would like to hear of them. This is pretty unusual. I remarked on this in a contribution entitled “Close Compounds in Irish Place-Names” in A Land that lies Westward (eds. McClure, Kirk & Storrie, 2009), and also noted that fada lacks a cognate in Welsh. I also noted the use of the synonym sith ‘long’ in some compound words such as sithlong ‘long-boat’ and sithbhac ‘long-bow’, although I was unable to find any secure examples in place-names. The same can be said of the word buí ‘yellow’: no close-compound place-names and no Welsh cognate. In the case of buí, there is an obvious reason: it is a borrowing of Latin badius, and Latin, unlike early Celtic languages, does not favour close compounds. But I had no explanation for fada. The penny has now dropped. Looking for a Brittonic cognate for fada is asking the wrong question, because it is Brittonic, later borrowed into Irish. Fada and the related noun fad are closely related to Welsh word hyd ‘length’, and it has a Goidelic cognate, which is sioth (OIr. sith). As mentioned earlier, it does not show Irish lenition, but, like Welsh hyd, it is derived from Proto-Celtic *SITUS and it actually does show lenition, but Brittonic lenition, of medial -t- > -d-. In Old Irish the Goidelic-derived word sith was used in close compounds, but the Brittonic-derived fada was employed as a postpositive adjective, and this usage came to dominate in Modern Irish, hence the preponderance of names like Doire Fada and Droim Fada and the absence of any equivalent close-compound names. There are a few close-compound items of lexis cited by Dinneen with fad as the first element, e.g. fad-análach ‘long-breathed’, but these are modern creations and so are too recent to be recorded in DIL. How then do Ir. fada and fad relate to Welsh hyd? At the moment, I must confess that I do not have a complete solution for the phonology. The final -d is fine, but the initial f- is puzzling and the vowel is also problematic. I note that early forms of fad ‘length’ include fuit and ut as well as fot and fat (DIL). Is it possible that an early Brittonic form *sidu- was adopted into Irish and then erroneously etymologised as *swidu-, producing an initial f- as the lenited form of sw- when used as a postpositive adjective (cf. siúr, lenited form in deirfiúr)? Or perhaps the f- is simply prothetic, as in oscailt/foscailt, uinnse/fuinnse, with the prothetic form winning out entirely. There may be dialect factors or the analogical influence of other words at play here, but I do not have a definitive answer, and I would appreciate any input. I am convinced, however, that these words are related because of the strong semantic links, and the consistent similar usage in idioms. The title of the Welsh song Ar Hyd y Nos, “All Through the Night”, translates into Irish as “Ar Fad na hOíche”. Cyhyd â fy mod i'n byw… “As long as I live…” translates as “Chomh fada agus a bhfuil mé beo…”. That the Brittonic-derived forms fada / fad prevailed over the Goidelic-derived form sioth is remarkable but not implausible. We have the same situation with the name of our patron saint, where the Brittonic form Pádraig has prevailed over the short-lived Goidelic alternative Cothriche. 05/06/18 I received a very interesting query in response to this blog from Cathal Ó, asking how the word feadh is related to fada. I hadn’t considered this originally, and it seems that the standard etymological reference works have not considered it either. However, it seems an excellent suggestion. Semantically, feadh as a noun signifying ‘extent, distance, space, duration’ is close in meaning to fad/fud (noun) and fada (adjective), both of which can also refer to space or time. “Ar feadh”, ‘during, throughout’, is used in a very similar way to “ar fad”, e.g. compare “ar feadh na hoiche” and “ar fad na hoíche” or “an oíche ar fad”. Phonetically, they have a different vowel and feadh shows lenition of the final d, whilst fad and fada show unlenited d. Most interestingly, feadh originates from Old Irish ed (DIL), without the initial f, which only develops later, showing clearly that it is prothetic. This brings it very near to the form of Welsh hyd, sometimes hed, and Breton hed, ‘length’ etc., derived from Proto-Celtic *SITUS. The change of Proto-Celtic initial s- > h- is regular in Brittonic, and if a Brittonic form such as hed were borrowed into early Irish, the initial h- would, of course, have been lost as Irish has no word-initial h-, except for the grammatical h- inserted at word boundaries. This would have yielded ed in Old Irish, exactly the form we have, developing to feadh in Modern Irish. This begs the question whether fada and fad could have a similar origin with a prothetic f-. The variant Old Irish form ut for fut/fot suggests that this is a strong possibility. If this analysis is correct, we have a plethora of forms in Irish derived from Proto-Celtic *SITUS or similar, meaning ‘length’: feadh, fad and fud all appear to be Brittonic forms inherited into Irish, with later addition of a prothetic f-, with variation in the vowel and presence/absence of lenition of d-. Fada is derived from a closely related form and also shows prothetic f-, with no lenition of d-. Only the literary word sith ‘lastingness, endurance’ and the prefixed adjective sith- ‘long, lasting’ show a characteristic Goidelic development form this root. I acknowledge the multiple outcomes from a single source and suggest they may be due to the different routes into Modern Irish taken by these words. Sith shows regular development from Proto-Celtic to Goidelic, while the other elements seem to indicate borrowing from Brittonic into Irish. Perhaps the different forms of fada, fad, fud and feadh can be explained as deriving from elements which were related but already distinct in Proto-Celtic (we should expect separate forms for adjective and noun, at the very least), but borrowing from Brittonic at different times and/or from different dialects may also be a factor. Go raibh mile maith agat, a Chathail! 07/06/18 Another very pertinent piece of feedback came from Adrian Martyn, who asked a more general question: “Paul, have you any thoughts on the means by which all these non-Gaeilge terms came to feature in it?” I was working away from home for several weeks shortly after posting the last blog article, so I was unable to respond to this query while the blog was open for comments, so I will attempt to answer it here now. I presume that the question relates both to the six Latin elements and to the one Brittonic element (fada) I’ve looked at so far. The short answer is that I haven’t yet worked out a precise model to explain these influences on early Irish. A major motivation for me to write this blog is to use it precisely to try to develop such a model. However, naturally enough, I do have some ideas, so I will try to give a more detailed answer, while trying to avoid committing myself to anything which cannot be justified from the rather meagre evidence. This evidence includes not just the specific words I’ve examined over the last few months in this etymology blog (which wouldn’t amount to much of a corpus!), but also a number of place-names and place-name elements which appear to have Latin or Brittonic links. Further evidence for Brittonic in Ireland has been suggested notably by T.F. O’Rahilly in Early Irish History and Mythology (1946, largely from names of population groups and from their myths and traditions), by Art Ó Maolfabhail in his article “Ar Lorg na Breatnaise in Éirinn” in Ainm 8 (2000, mainly place-names evidence) and by Paul Russell in An Introduction to the Celtic Languages (1995, loanwords) and also in his chapter “What was best of every language” in A New History of Ireland (2005). Russell 2005 observes that the very words Gael and Gaeilge appear to be Brittonic rather than Goidelic origin, because they show initial g- like Welsh Gwyddel, ‘Irishman’, and Gwyddeleg, ‘Irish language’, rather than an initial f-, as would be expected of a word inherited from Proto-Celtic undergoing the usual Goidelic sound changes. It seems to me far more likely that speakers of Irish would have adopted this word from Brittonic-speaking neighbours living in Ireland than by contact across the sea with Brittonic speakers in Britain. I would make the following observations: The Brittonic elements found in place-names and place-name elements (such as gaoth ‘estuary, channel’) have a markedly stronger distribution in the northern half of Ireland (Leth Cuinn), while the Latin/Romance elements I’ve highlighted (e.g. féith, ‘bog channel’, seemingly from same root as gaoth, though with slightly different application) sometimes have a markedly southern distribution (Leth Moga). The fact that some of the Latin/Romance elements such as álainn, bán, féith point specifically to a borrowing from Romance dialects of the Iberian Peninsula (early Spanish or Portuguese dialects) is consistent with them appearing in the south of Ireland as the south coast faces towards Iberia. This is suggestive of the north-south divide observed by archaeologists in Iron Age Ireland, with La Tène material largely restricted to the northern half of the island (Leth Cuinn), while the southern half seems less technologically advanced and has much in common with Iron Age Iberia (“The beehive quern in Ireland”, Seamus Caulfield, 1977). On the other hand, at the end of the Iron Age, shortly before the early Christian period, we see the emergence of a cultural innovation which has a markedly southern distribution, namely the ogam inscriptions (highly concentrated in the counties of Cork, Kerry, Waterford and Kilkenny). Rather than thinking in terms of a sharp north-south linguistic divide in the Iron Age, I prefer to think of two different vectors of cultural and linguistic influence: an east-to-west vector from Britain, affecting the northern half of Ireland more strongly, and a south-to-north vector from southern Europe affecting the southern half of Ireland more strongly. The lexis of Old Irish has more in common with Brittonic than Modern Irish does. Witness, for example, the replacement of several Old Irish terms for body parts with Brittonic cognates by Modern Irish terms apparently unique to Goidelic, e.g. OIr. dét ‘tooth’ (cf. Welsh dant) replaced by Ir. fiacail; OIr. gin ‘mouth’ (cf. Welsh genau) replaced by Ir. béál; OIr. traig ‘foot’ (cf. Welsh troed) replaced by Ir. cos. O’Rahilly argued that a Goidelic form of Celtic arrived in Ireland as late as 150-50 B.C. from S.W. France, and that three previous ‘waves’ of Celtic invaders (Cruithin, Érainn/Fir Bolg and Laighinn) had spoken Brittonic dialects of Celtic. I think this is probably too extreme and overstretching the evidence. The southern innovations I have noted have to do with Latin/early Romance influence rather than anything which is intrinsically Q-Celtic or Goidelic. A more plausible scenario for me is that Goidelic was long established in Ireland, that it had lost ground (geographically and/or in terms of the social hierarchy) to Brittonic-speaking incomers prior to, or at the time of the emergence of La Tène culture, and that it had begun a comeback in the centuries immediately prior to the arrival of Christianity and literacy. A comparable situation might be the case of English, which nearly lost out to French in the centuries following the Norman Conquest of Britain, but which regained ground from the 14th century onwards. O’Rahilly’s contribution remains important for the strong case he makes for Brittonic dialects being spoken in Ireland, rather than mere Brittonic influence due to cultural contact across the Irish sea. However, it should be borne in mind that the further one goes back in time, the closer the Goidelic and Brittonic branches of Celtic are to one another, and some of the distinguishing phonological characteristics are, in any case, downplayed by many modern scholars who regard them as somewhat trivial.