A Further Note on sa in Archaic Irish

Abstract

In LANG. 16.12-6, I indicated that alongside of som, cases occurred where sa was also employed in archaic Irish as the enclitic emphasizing pronoun of the third person masculine and neuter. After citing several instances that seemed to me reasonably certain, I quoted a few examples which were open to question. Among these, I included focicertsa from the unpublished version of the Bruiden Atha I in the Yellow Book of Lecan, and I added (16.15) that Kuno Meyer regarded it as 'a scribal error for fo-cicherr, though it should be noted that in the recension printed from Stowe MS 992 sum apparently replaces sa'. But upon examining the photostats of both MSS of this text which have just reached me, I find that Meyer's statement and mine need to be somewhat revised. In the first place, the Yellow Book of Lecan writes fochicertsa and not focicertsa as Meyer asserts.' In the second place, there are several illegible lines at this point in Stowe MS 992, so that sum in this codex does not replace sa in the other MS, but is all that can be read of do-ronsom 'we have done', which occurs later in the Yellow Book of Lecan. The reading corresponding to fochicertsa cannot, therefore, be established in Stowe MS 992. That is regrettable, since fochicertsa cannot be right as the context shows: dia-marad mac Maic Niad, fo-chicert-sa mu gair gubai-si 'if the son of Mac Niad were alive, he would utter (literally: would put) my cry of lamentation'.2 Here, the sequence of tenses requires the conditional 3d sg. fo-cichred and not the future 3d sg. fo-cicherr as Meyer proposed. But more significant would have been the fact whether the scribe of Stowe MS 9923 substituted som for sa or retained the archaic form of the emphasizing pronoun. That, unfortunately, cannot be determined. Although the verb may have been incorrectly transmitted, the Yellow Book of Lecan, which is the older and better MS, has at least preserved sa, nor is the survival of this archaism surprising, since other linguistic evidence