Rhyming pairs in the early Middle Irish biblical epic Saltair na Rann: Survey and analysis of phonological and graphic patterns

Abstract

The present thesis examines the words in final rhyming position for their phonological and orthographical pattern in the Middle Irish narrative poem known as Saltair na Rann ('Psalter of Stanzas'). This analysis, the scale of which has not been dealt with in regard to a single corpus, helps to advance the understanding of rhyming patterns in the Old and early Middle Irish language. It is especially interesting to examine those rhyming pairs that display what has been understood to be an irregularity, either phonological or orthographical, and to see whether certain rhyming rules that have been established need revising. This thesis also includes modern metrical theory from different linguistic backgrounds, not so much to apply those theories to the early Middle Irish poem at hand, but to show and open new possibilities regarding metrical studies in the Irish language.