February 2009 Archives

Early on my second day, I heard the apartment door open and poked my head out of my room to find a tall, strange Frenchman standing in the hallway. We introduced ourselves, speculated on our third flatmate and parted ways. A bit later, I went out to meet another friend for coffee. She took me across the bridge and showed me around Patrick St, telling me where I could find all of the various things I needed to get. I bought a SIM card for my phone and tried exploring a bit on my own, but eventually chickened out and walked back home. A couple days afterward, our Irish flatmate showed up to complete the apartment. I'm not sure I ended up making it further than Tesco in the first week.

My first sight of campus came walking through the big gates on Western Rd for the first day of orientation. The first day of orientation itself was relatively uneventful, and with the huge crowd of US students I didn't see any of the University of Montana people. The second day we had an "academic walkabout", which seemed to consist of all of the hundreds of foreign students packing into a small room and trying to eke information out of those departments which did decide to show up. Unsurprisingly, the Department of Modern Irish was not among them. I ended up speaking to someone from Ionad na Gaeilge Labhartha and had my first opportunity to use the Irish I brought with me. I also ran into two of the students I'd met in Montana and we traded contact information.

Classes began on Monday. I was a little shocked at how well I was able to understand the lecturer in Irish, but it was also something of a shock to my system to hear so much Irish strung together and directed at me. Considering enrolling in the Certificate in Irish Studies program, I also ended up in a couple of classes with C., one of the Montana students. Since First Arts Irish (GA1003 - Bunstaidéar ar Theanga agus ar Chultúr na Gaeilge) wasn't open to visiting students, I had to go into the office to see if they could make alternate arrangements. I wasn't quite confident enough to try to speak Irish with the secretary and it's perhaps because of this that when I asked about GA1003 she directed me to Ionad na Gaeilge Labhartha across the lobby. Meekly, I went over and knocked on the window there, where I was sent back to Roinn na Nua-Ghaeilge. I went back and explained that I wasn't looking for a beginning Irish class and ended up speaking to the head of the department. It was here also that I first experienced a somewhat unsettling phenomenon: when I mentioned that I was from Montana, both the head of the department and the secretary knew almost instantly that I had been taught by the apparently-infamous Traolach Ó Ríordáin.

The next weekend, a big group of the international students living in my apartment complex headed out early and hopped on the bus to Blarney. The weather was fantastic and Blarney Castle was packed with people. I made use of the opportunity to begin filling up my new 4G card for my camera. The castle was impressive, at least considering I'd never seen anything like it before. After the castle, though, we walked through the Rock Close adjacent. The area is beautiful, filled with interesting stone formations and plant life. We also took a long walk around the lake and explored the woods. They were totally different from anything I'm used to in Montana. The undergrowth was minimal, not the tangled forest I know back home. All of us were fairly tired when we arrived back at the bus stop. A little coffee shop was open and selling ice cream, so I got a large cone and enjoyed it while sitting on the curb, waiting for the bus back to Cork.

I am a frequent contributor at the English Wiktionary, largely contributing Irish translations of English words. Recently, someone added a request for the etymology of the Irish word "dún", meaning "fort" and a common element in Irish placenames--such as Dún na nGall ("Fort of the Foreigners"), the Irish on Donegal. This is a request easily filled. The earliest attested form of the word is the Old Irish "dún", carrying the same meaning. I decided I'd see what else I could dig up, though.

There's an online etymological dictionary for Celtic languages available at http://www.indo-european.nl/. It has some apparent encoding problems and does not source its data, but what I've been able to compare of its Proto-Indo-European roots usually matches up with other sources. I fed it "dún" to see what it had to say. It traces the word back to the Proto-Celtic root *dūno- and lists a few cognates in other Celtic languages. Then, however, it gets interesting.

Matasović provides both a Proto-Indo-European form *dʰuHno- ("enclosure") and a cognate in none other than Old English, namely "dūn". Come the Great Vowel Shift ca. 1500 and you end up with Modern English "down", a now-archaic word meaning "hill" (and still found in some placenames). The Oxford English Dictionary also suggests that an inflected form meaning "off the hill" is the origin of the adverbial form we know and love.

Things do get more interesting from there. Matasović also suggests that English "town" and German "Zaun" ("fence") are related to this word through a Proto-Germanic form *tūno-, the Modern English coming from the Old English "tūn". This would, of course, suggest that in Proto-Germanic the forms *dūno- and *tūno- existed side by side. To explain this, Matasović suggests that *tūno- is borrowed from Proto-Celtic *dūno- somewhere along the line. To explain this, we'll look more closely at the Proto-Indo-European root and a few sound changes that occurred in languages derived from Proto-Indo-European.

As mentioned above, the Proto-Indo-European form Matasović gives is *dʰuHno-. Proto-Germanic underwent a series of sound changes, including the change from PIE *dʰ > *d. Presumably this change happens in Proto-Celtic as well, though I haven't read any research on this. (It seems both also have PIE *uH > *ū. I'm not clear on what exactly happens here. The H itself could be one of three proposed sounds in PIE, but I'm too unfamiliar with PIE to speculate much.) However, Proto-Germanic also undergoes a change of PIE *d > *t. If Matasović is correct, this would indicate the following order of events: Proto-Celtic changes *dʰ > *d, Proto-Germanic borrows Proto-Celtic *dūno-, Proto-Germanic changes *d > *t and *dʰ > *d. The first of the Proto-Germanic sound changes would have to happen either earlier than or contemporaneously with the second for the sounds to remain separate.

There's more, of course. Thinking of Old English "dūn" and the semantically similar Modern English "dune", I decided to investigate the provenance of that word as well. The OED's earliest citation for the word is 1790 and its etymology section indicates it comes from Modern French "dune". It also indicates that this latter is cited in Old French in the 13th century, Old French having borrowed it from Middle Dutch "dûne". This in turn derives from Old Dutch "dûna". Wiktionary goes on to suggest that this is a borrowing from a Celtic language, while the Online Etymological Dictionary suggests specifically that it is from Gaulish *dunom (Gaulish being a Celtic language spoken on the Continent). Of note, neither Wiktionary nor the Online Etymological Dictionary give citations for their suggestions and neither is necessarily reliable. (Though a niggling point, that other sources consistently give *dunum as the reconstruction of the Gaulish reflex of *dūno- may demonstrate why I distrust Etymonline.)

It is possible that this form is a borrowing from a Celtic language. It also seems to me (though unbolstered by research or clear knowledge of the various changes that occurred in the languages involved) that Old Dutch could simply have derived its form from the same Proto-Germanic root that yielded Old English "dūn". Then again, that root could itself be an even earlier borrowing from Proto-Celtic. It's possible that some research into Indo-European languages outside of Proto-Celtic and Proto-Germanic would reveal a reflex that indicated that the PIE root did exist. Further research is, as always, necessary.