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David Stifter

National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Early Irish, Faculty Member

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Studying Old Irish at Maynooth University.
Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project Chronologicon Hibernicum - A Probabilistic Chronological Framework for Dating Early Irish Language Developments and Literature' (Horizon2020 Grant Agreement no. 647351) (https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/chronhib).

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Papers by David Stifter

La phonologie et graphie du gallo-grec_preprint

Écrire sur la pierre en langue gauloise, sous la direction de Coline Ruiz Darasse, 2025

Pre-print of a chapter on the phonology and orthography of Gaulish in the Gallo-Greek inscription... more

Noídetu (preprint)

Craobh Eolais, 2025

Ní teanga mharbh í an tSean-Ghaeilge fad a bheidh téacsanna nua á scríobh inti agus fad is féidir... more Ní teanga mharbh í an tSean-Ghaeilge fad a bheidh téacsanna nua á scríobh inti agus fad is féidir focal nua a chruthú agus iad a chur lena léacsacan. Is nuachruthú mar sin é an focal SG noídetu 'naoiréad', ainmfhocal teibí díorthaithe ón ainmfhocal uimhriúil SG noíde 'naoi rud, trí tríréad, trí tríonóid', arna chruth in analach leis an nasc idir SG cethardae 'ceathair rud' agus SG cethardatu 'ceathairéad, ceathairníon'. Tairgim mo noídetu glúas mar shaothar onóra dár bhfear uasal san alt seo mar nach dóthain dó tríonóid shimplí.

Where do we go from here?

Colloquium in memoriam Rudolf Thurneysen. 29.–31. August 2024, Bonn, 2025

Old Irish grammars - past, present and future

Donaghmore Ogam Stone I KID 008 (preprint)

Journal of the Kildare Archaeological Society, 2025

An edition and discussion of the Donaghmore ogam stone, including a study and etymology of the og... more

format_quoteOgam stones are rare in County Kildare, with significant discoveries concentrated mainly along Ireland's southern coast.format_quote

More on san in Cisalpine Celtic

Cisalpine Celtic literacy. Proceedings of the international symposium, Maynooth 23–24 June 2022, 2024

In this article, I first revisit my arguments from 2010 that the letter san 𐌑 in Cisalpine Celtic... more In this article, I first revisit my arguments from 2010 that the letter san
𐌑 in Cisalpine Celtic inscriptions in the Lepontic script represents not
only the sound *tˢ (tau Gallicum), but also occurs in positions where
Proto-Celtic *d is expected. The second part of the article is dedicated to
the nine attestations of the letter san that have become known since 2010.
One instance, akluśamoụalos (NO·28) < *ad-klut-(i)samo-u̯alo- ‘mostheard-
about ruler’, is strong evidence for the sound value *tˢ. The other
eight instances, all from the high-Alpine site of Carona (Bergamo), are
more difficult to interpret. Various etymological suggestions are made
for the words containing them, but none of them is incontrovertible
evidence for either *tˢ or *d. Seven of the nine new instances of san
are written with the usual butterfly sign 𐌑, two with the rare and late
double-axe sign 𐌑. The new evidence contains two possible examples
of word-initial san.

Observations on the use of attention markers in Comrac Líadaine ⁊ Chuirithir

Studia Celtica Posnaniensia , 2024

In a series of articles, Aaron Griffith (2008, 2010, 2011, 2013) and Bernhard Bauer (2018: 12-13)... more In a series of articles, Aaron Griffith (2008, 2010, 2011, 2013) and Bernhard Bauer (2018: 12-13) have shed light on the pragmatic function and the syntactic operation of the Old Irish notae augentes and the anaphoric pronoun suide/-side, which for practical purposes can be grouped together under the umbrella term ‘attention markers’. The comparatively high incidence of these elements in the late Old Irish tale Comrac Líadaine ⁊ Chuirithir ‘The Encounter of Líadain and Cuirithir’ (Stifter forthc.), provides an opportunity to test these hypotheses and to add to and refine the description of their syntactic and pragmatic functions. In addition to two previously established functions, namely 1. to direct the mental focus of the recipients and 2. to distinguish between overall and temporarily salient referents, two hitherto unrecognised usages of attention markers can be identified for Old Irish, namely 3. as argument-fillers after quotative verbs, and 4. as verbal gender-markers.
The appendix of this article also contains the text of a new edition of the Old Irish tale Comrac Líadaine ⁊ Chuirithir ‘The Encounter of Líadain and Cuirithir’.

Rétglu etir rind (Is álaind a llae indíu)

I wrote this neo-Old Irish hymn for the Maynooth Christmas Carol Service 2024. The music score is... more

Acaldam Find ocus Oiséni "The Dialogue of Find and Oiséne" (preprint)

The Book of Ballycummin (forthcoming)

A new edition of an Old Irish prosimetric tale about Find and his son Oiséne, being one of the ea... more

format_quoteManuscripts reveal modern copying errors, obscuring the original text and complicating its verification from surviving copies.format_quote

Prehistoric Layers of Loanwords in Old Irish

Sub-Indo-European Europe. Problems, Methods, Results. Edited by Guus Kroonen, 2024

This chapter is concerned with the complex question of layers of loanwords in the attested Celtic... more

The Christmas Story in the Poems of Blathmac (pre-print)

Christmas and the Irish. A Miscellany. Edited by Salvador Ryan, 2023

The first formulation of the Christmas narrative as a literary text in the Irish language comes a... more

format_quoteThe Christmas narrative is identified in 8th-century Irish poems, surviving only in a 17th-century manuscript.format_quote

Early Literacy and Multilingualism in Ireland and Britain

by Nora White, David Stifter, and Katherine Forsyth

Alex Mullen and George Woudhuysen (eds.), Languages and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces, 2023

The focus of this chapter is on the early literate tradition in the Irish language and how this t... more The focus of this chapter is on the early literate tradition in the Irish language and how this tradition was born in the multilingual interaction with a neighbouring written culture, namely that of Latin in the island of Britain. Since a crucial part of this interaction with Ireland happened through British intermediaries or took place in Britain, both regions of the western archipelago will be considered in this survey, though the very different historical and sociolinguistic scenarios in the two islands necessitates looking at each separately.

Comrac Líadaine ⁊ Chuirithir 'Mar a tháinig Liadhain agus Cuirithir le chéile'

Léachtaí Cholm Cille 53, 2023

The Rise of Gemination in Celtic

Open Research Europe. Linguistic Diversity collection, 2023

This study investigates systematically the emergence and establishment of geminate consonants as ... more This study investigates systematically the emergence and establishment of geminate consonants as a phonological class in the Celtic branch of Indo-European. The approach of this study is comparative historical linguistics, drawing on diachronic structuralism combined with aspects of language contact studies and functional approaches to language usage. This study traces the development of geminates from Proto-Indo-European (fourth millennium B.C.), which did not allow geminate consonants, to the Common Celtic period (first millennium B.C.), when almost every consonant could occur as a singleton or as a geminate, and on to the earliest attested stages of the Insular Celtic languages (first millennium A.D.). Although they were prominent in the phonology of Proto-and Ancient Celtic (Gaulish, Celtiberian), ultimately geminates were gotten rid of as a phonological class in the individual Insular Celtic languages. This is probably due to the fact that the contrast between lenited and unlenited sounds took on a central role in Insular Celtic phonology, making gemination a redundant category. Most instances of geminate consonants in Celtic can be explained by regular sound change operating on inherited clusters of consonants. Each sound change will be discussed in a separate section in a rough chronological order. Effectively, gemination is largely a strategy to reduce the number of allowed consonant combinations. To a limited degree, gemination also had a morphological function, especially in the formation of personal names and in the creation of adjectival neologisms. However, there is a residue of words, especially nouns, in the Insular Celtic languages that defy any attempt at etymologising. They are prime suspects of having been borrowed from prehistoric, substratal languages.

Old Breton guiler, guilerou, guileri and Old Welsh gueleri (pre-print)

Celtica, 2022

Recent research has put a spotlight on the close relationship between several extant early mediev... more Recent research has put a spotlight on the close relationship between several extant early medieval glossed manuscripts of the computistical works of the Venerable Bede, in particular of his De temporum ratione. Of particular interest for the present note are some manuscripts with glosses in vernacular medieval Celtic languages, namely Augiensis perg. 167 at the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, hereafter Crb, from the first half of the 9 th century (Thes.

A Cryptic probatio pennae in the Seifin Duanaire (TCD MS H 4. 22 (1363), part XII) (pre-print)

by David Stifter and Chantal Kobel

Celtica, 2022

This article provides an edition and translation of a probatio pennae of four short lines length,... more This article provides an edition and translation of a probatio pennae of four short lines length, found on a slip inserted in the so-called Seifín Duanaire. This brief note is written in a deliberately obscure style. One line is written in reverse to conceal an attack at a prominent political figure, Máel Mórdha. We suggest identifications for Máel Mórdha and the scribe of the note, Fearghal Ó Gabhann, both of which have connections to the region of Bréifne, and we make proposals to the meaning of the last two lines that appear to add reflections by Fearghal about his note.

Contributions to Celtiberian Etymology III. The Bronze of Novallas (Z.02.01)

Palaeohispanica, 2022

This article makes etymological proposals for five words in the Celtiberian inscription from Nova... more This article makes etymological proposals for five words in the Celtiberian inscription from Novallas (Z.02.01): the place name TERGAⱾ is connected with Western Indo-European *tr̥go-/tergeh₂- ‘market’; DOIBIM is explained as a dative dual *dou̯ibim ‘to the two’; the gerund DVNDOM ‘to give’ is tentatively analysed as *dh₃(u)-un-do-; MEDOM is compared with Old Irish med ‘measure, balance’ and Welsh medd ‘authority’; and the fragmentary DERNV[ is compared with words for ‘hand’ or ‘palm’ in other Celtic languages. It is suggested to transcribe the new sibilant sign of Celtiberian with Ȿ (Unicode 2C7E).

Strategies in tracing linguistic variation in a corpus of Old Irish texts (CorPH)

by David Stifter, Fangzhe Dimurjan Qiu, and Nora White

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2022

This article introduces Corpus PalaeoHibernicum (CorPH), a corpus currently consisting of 78 text... more This article introduces Corpus PalaeoHibernicum (CorPH), a corpus currently consisting of 78 texts in Early Irish (c. 7th-10th cent.) created by the ERC-funded Chronologicon Hibernicum (ChronHib) project by bringing together pre-existing lexical and syntactic databases and adding further crucial texts from the period. In addition to being annotated for POS, morphological and syntactic information, another layer of annotation has been developed for CorPH-'Variation Tagging', i.e. a tagset that numerically encodes synchronic language variation during the Early Irish period, thus allowing for much improved research on the chronological variation among the material. Another new pillar of studying linguistic variation is Bayesian Language Variation Analysis (BLaVA), in order to address the challenge that "not-so-big data" poses to statistical corpus methods. Instead of reflecting feature frequencies, BLaVA models language variation as probabilities of variation.

Developing a Digital Framework for the Medieval Gaelic World

by David Stifter and Christopher Yocum

Project report of an AHRC-IRC-funded Digital Humanities networking grant

format_quoteAn Inventory of Digital Projects revealed uneven engagement and funding in digitization, suggesting annual updates could help scholars assess the field's progress.format_quote

The Etymology of Breton gad "hare" (pre-print)

Études Celtiques, 2021

This article argues that gad, the hitherto unexplained Breton word for 'hare', is a cognate of Ol... more This article argues that gad, the hitherto unexplained Breton word for 'hare', is a cognate of Old Irish gat 'theft'. The semantic bridge between the two ostensibly distant concepts is the widespread folk belief that hares are shapeshifting witches who steal milk. In the second part, after a discussion of the historical phonology of the postulated reconstruction *gaddā-'theft', and in particular of the treatment of geminate *dd in Breton, it is tentatively suggested that the word may be a borrowing from an unknown substrate language into Insular Celtic.

format_quoteOld Irish gat's first meaning, unrelated to 'hare', demonstrates the complexity of establishing true cognates in Celtic linguistics.format_quote

In Memoriam Albert Bock

Keltische Forschungen, 2019

A tribute to Albert Bock, co-founder of Brennos-Verein für Keltologie and Keltische Forschungen, ... more

format_quoteA successful trial phase for Celtic Studies in Vienna began in 1999, thanks to Albert's teaching and leadership capabilities.format_quote