Social and Cultural Motivations and Semantic Shifts in Latin Doublet Borrowings in Old Irish

Latin borrowings in Early Irish and Brittonic are, as usually, connected with Christianization and wide spreading of Latin learning and monastic culture. At the same time, we can find in Irish and Welsh some earlier borrowings due to the Romanization of Brittany. Early borrowings differ by their phonetics. The article deals with the problem of semantic changes of Latin loanwords in Irish and with the motivation of their development inside the Irish cultural space. The author tries to give a pattern of such ‘semantic shift’ based on genetic and potential polysemy that result from a complex interplay of cognitive processes and cultural and social changes. Lat. planta gave in OI clann ‘family, offspring’, later – ‘children’. In the “Language of the Glosses” (VII–VIII c.) both meanings ‘family’ and ‘plantations, offspring’ are attested. The word did outset Early Irish law-term for kinship – fine, which covered descendants through the male line of the same great-grandfather. In Old Irish the word clann is used for designation of the children of the same father, but also can have a wider meaning ‘descendants, family’ (in a large sense). Old Irish language borrowed later from written Latin the lexeme planta in the form planda, with the meaning ‘offspring, plantations’ and with the subsequent development of the meaning ‘descendants, offspring’. The lack in the language semantic field of the denotation of ‘family’ in its narrow sense represented a cause of later borrowing of the Latin monasterium (> muintir) to describe not only the inhabitants of the monastery, but also a family-group in general. The later borrowing mainistir had the meaning ‘abbey’. In Modern Irish dialects the English loa word faimilí is also attested that demonstrates the lack of appropriate item on the autochthon Irish mental map.м

Genealogy · Irish · Kinship · Linguistics · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy · Psychology