Some peculiarities of the Milan glosses

Abstract

The relative uniformity of Old Irish has lead many scholars to conclude that Old Irish represents a written standard of the language. Despite this impression having been, at least partially, derived from the canonical Old Irish of the glosses of Milan, Würzburg and St. Gall, there are a few distinct ways in which Milan deviates not only from expected Old Irish forms, but also from its contemporaries. These variations are enough to demonstrate that the scribes of Milan were certainly not operating with the same variety of Old Irish as the other two corpora, though whether it be an issue of dialect or a competing standard remains to be seen. This paper will provide collections of four such variations and will discuss potential origins of them.