The quotatives Old Irish ol / olsé and Middle Welsh heb / hebyr

Abstract

The etymologies of Irish ol(sé) and Welsh heb(yr) and the relationship between their short and long forms remain controversial. While ol is clearly of non-verbal origin, heb and hebyr may be forms of a verb or verbs meaning ‘say’ or ‘follow’, or may have fallen together with such verb(s). But hebyr may also be compared to the syntactically and prosodically similar olsé and be analysed as preposition heb ‘past’ + demonstrative -yr < *sin. If so, hebyr may be a deictic quotative ‘beyond that’ equivalent to olsé ‘beyond this, moreover’. Heb, if not a verb, may have been extracted from hebyr, just as ol, according to Quin, was extracted from olsé. Alternatively, heb may be a conjunction ‘and this, more-over, namely’, cognate with the Irish conjunction(s) sech. In an Appendix it is shown that the definite article was very rare before personal names in early Welsh (unlike Middle Irish), casting further doubt on the theory of Pedersen and Thurneysen that y(r) in ‘heb y Peredur’ etc. is the article.