Provides a criticism of the view stemming from A. G. van Hamel that the early Irish lacked gods based on the discussion and rejection of the definitions of ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ offered in Religion and the decline of magic and Man and the natural world by Sir Keith V. Thomas.
Argues that an Indo-European syntactical rule underlies the Old Irish (and also Welsh) omision of the ordinal ‘first’ in complex numeral phrases, for which an Albanian parallel is found, and that in both these languages this deletion is replaced by an new form for ‘first’ based on the cardinal.
ad W. Meid, Über Albion, elfydd, Albiorix und andere Indikatoren eines keltischen Weltbildes, in (pp. 435-439) Celtic Linguistics: Ieithyddiaeth Geltaidd: Readings in the Brythonic Languages, ed. by M. Ball, J. Fife, E. Poppe and J. Rowlands (Amsterdam 1990).
Investigates and describes the uses of preposition la and also of competing con, including a summary of the signs foreboding the substitution of the former by the latter.
Salberg (Trond Kruke): The question of the main interpolation of H into M’s part of the Serglige Con Culainn in the Book of the Dun Cow and some related problems.
Examines the interpolation at 48b11-49a16, and argues that the
erased space could not have accommodated section x
(48b12-49a5), thought by R. Thurneysen (in Best² 1030) to come from recension A, if written in M’s hand, therefore concluding with M. Dillon (in Best² 1138a) that x is from recension B.
Pierre-Yves Lambert, in ÉtC 32 (1996), pp. 317-318.