and interest. From that day to the present it is safe to say
that the value set upon the Irish language and literature has been
steadily growing amongst the scholars of the world, and that in the
domain of philology Old Irish now ranks close to Sanscrit for its
truly marvellous and complicated scheme of word-forms and
inflections, and its whole verbal system.

The exact place which the Celtic languages (of which Irish is
philologically far the most important) hold in the Indo-European
group has often been discussed. It is now generally agreed upon that,
although both the Celtic and Teutonic languages may claim a certain
kinship with each other as being both of them Indo-European, still
the Celtic is much more nearly related to the Greek and the Latin
groups, especially to the Latin.

All the Indo-European languages are more or less related to one
another. We Irish must acknowledge a relationship, or rather a very
distant connecting tie, with English. But, to trace this home, Irish
must be followed back to the very oldest form of its words, and
English must be followed back to Anglo-Saxon and when possible to
Gothic. The hard mutes (p, t, c) of Celtic (and, for that matter, of
Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Lithuanian) will be
represented in Gothic by the corresponding soft mutes (b, d, g), and
the soft mutes in Celtic by the corresponding, hard mutes in Gothic.
Thus we find the Irish _dia_ (god) in the Anglo-Saxon _tiw_, the god
of war, whose name is perpetuated for all time in Tiwes-daeg, now
"Tuesday", and we find the Irish _dead_ in the Anglo-Saxon "toth",
now "tooth", and so on. But of all the Indo-European languages Old
Irish possesses by far the nearest affinity to Latin, and this is
shown in a great many ways, not in the vocabulary merely, but in the
grammar, which for philologists is of far more importance,--as, for
example, the _b_-future, the passive in-_r_, the genitive singular
and nominative plural of "o stems", etc. Thus the Old Irish for
"man", nom. _fer_, gen. _fir_, dat. _fiur_, acc. _fer n_--, plur.
nom. _fir_, gen. _fer n_--, is derived from the older forms _viros,
viri, viro, viron_, nom. plur. _viri_, gen. plur. _viron_, which
everyone who knows Latin can see at a glance correspond very closely
to the Latin inflections, _vir, viri, viro, virum_, nom. plur.
_viri_, etc.

So much for the language. When did this language begin to be used in
literature? This question depends upon anothe