Dr Jasmim Drigo

Postdoctoral research: Dr Jasmim Drigo

Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2024–2026)

Latinisation of Irish: Loanwords in the Old Irish glosses

The Irish language has a documented history going back some 1,500 years. Our most important early corpus is the collection of over 16,000 Old Irish glosses in manuscripts of the eighth and ninth centuries. These glosses, manifesting as interlinear and marginal annotations, constitute commentaries on Latin texts. Although the Irish glosses have been extensively analysed by Old Irish scholars, the interaction between these glosses and the Latin texts upon which they occur still remains overlooked. The absence of research about this interaction raises a significant question: do our earliest major sources for Irish really reflect a ‘pure’ form of the language? Or do they represent a language already shaped by the influence of Latin due to historical contact? This project undertakes the first comprehensive exploration of the extent to which Latin has permeated and influenced the Old Irish glosses, offering new perspectives on their linguistic development.

The main questions that this projects investigates are the following:

1. Compare the Latin loanwords in the glosses to see if they reflect the date of the creation of the glosses, i.e. if the Würzburg glosses, an earlier text, reflect earlier borrowings; and if the Saint Gall Priscian glosses, a later text, reflect later borrowings.

2. Identify and compare the semantic categories of the Latin loanwords in the glosses. Identify the technolects specific to each domain, e.g. specific words related to grammar, words related to theology, words related to daily life, words related to agriculture, etc.

3. Identify and compare the typology of the borrowings: what is the distribution of regular loanwords, calques, and nonce words? Do we see more of a specific type in the Würzburg glosses or in the Saint Gall Priscian glosses? Do we see more of a specific type in the one semantic category?

4. Conclude if the chronology of Latin loanwords into Old Irish established by previous scholars is reflected into these two texts.

E-mail: jasmim.sediedrigo@universityofgalway.ie
Mentor: Dr Pádraic Moran

Research areas: the Latin tradition, cross-cultural encounters