Lecture: “He taught him the hills and hills and hills of the province”

The Semantics of Old Irish Terms for Elevated Landscape Features

This study presents the semantic differentiation of Old Irish terms for elevated landscape features. The study combines methods and evidence from corpus lingusitics and place name research in order to identify semantic diffferences between (near) synonyms.

This study investigates the semantics of Old Irish terms in the lexical field ‘elevated landscape features’ in order to differentiate their semantics. The semantic investigation of lexical items for ‘height’ carried out by Liam Mac Mathúna (1988) was a first step in gaining an understanding of some of these lexical items. However, the limited availability of material and lack of digital methods only allowed him to investigate two lexical items in two Old Irish texts. A re-examination of more lexical items in a larger corpus of Old Irish is, therefore, warranted.
Through a combination of landscape semantics and place name evidence provides insight into the semantic variation of Old Irish terms for elevated landscape features. The semantic investigation is based on collocates in a corpus of Old Irish material that was compiled for my Master’s thesis. Additionally, place names that are attested in Old or Middle Irish are considered to gain a better understanding of the physical reality of the landscape features. This allows for the differentiation of terms that are given as (near) synonyms in the dictionary. For instance, tulach and cnocc are both defined as ‘hill, mound’ in the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language; however, tulach appears to be larger than cnocc, and cnocc has a potential for supernatural occurrences that is absent in tulach. The terms can thus be read as tulach ‘hill’ and cnocc ‘(potentially supernatural) mound’.

Bibliography:
“An Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language.” 2019. EDIL. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. 2019. http://dil.ie/ (Last Accessed 19.08.2022).

Mac Mathúna, Liam. 1988. “Old Irish Heights and Word-Field Potential.” Studia Hibernica 24 (1): 29-50.

Info

Day: 2022-11-03
Start time: 14:15
Duration: 00:30
Room: Wiwi-Bunker —Room 3018
Track: Historical Linguistics
Language: en

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