Twisted "sister"

[muckefuck]

Will the wonders of Goidelic historical phonology never cease? Five months ago, I posted an insight into the development of PIE *swesor in Irish, namely that the lenited form was fiur in Old Irish rather than *shiur because of the effect of the *w. At the time, I had no idea what the modern Scottish Gaelic form was and when I came across it in one of Campbell's tales last night, it caught me quite by surprise.

It's piuthar. From what I can tell, the medial th is an archaic retention (found in the Old Irish genitive, for instance), but how to explain that initial? My guess is that when the Teuchters levelled this one out, they did it based on the lenited form rather than the radical one. That is, when faced with the puzzling alternation *siuthar <-> *fiuthar, they decided that the latter was really phiuthar, and thus what they had here was a straightforward lenition of /p/ rather than a screwy change of /s/.

This is why I love force of analogy. You'd be hard-pressed to find a series of exceptionless sound changes that would transform /s/ into /p/, but cleaning up a messy paradigm can bring it about in one go!

Comments

[donncha22.livejournal.com]

"Siur" was disyllabic in Old Irish. Scottish Gaelic has preserved the disyllabicity (a word?) of many OI words, while they were reduced to monosyllables in Ireland. Another example of a disyllabic word in OI is "fiach" (= raven). It is treated as a single syllable with a diphthong in Irish, while it still fully disyllabic in ScG. The spelling convention in ScG is to show the hiatus between vowels in such cases with a *non-etymological* "th". Thus we have "fitheach" and "piuthar" for "raven" and "sister" in Scottish Gaelic.