Dia dhuit!
Just to avoid this blog drying up completely due to my lack of inspiration, I'll write about a funny little thing I noticed in Irish the other day.
In Irish if you greet someone you can say either "Dia dhuit" or "Dia duit", which is then answered with a "Dia 's Muire dhuit" or "Dia 's Muire duit".
this difference between 'duit' 'to you' and 'dhuit' also 'to you', is a matter of lenition. The first form is the grammatically correct form, you don't expect an intial d to be lenited in this environment.
Typically, lenition occurs intervocally, which also happened in Irish. It's usual for intervocalic lenition to only occur within word boundaries. This for example also happens in spoken Dutch, and even in some forms of written Dutch:
goede > goeie 'good', this one is considered very normal in speech.
oude > ouwe 'old', also very common in spoken Dutch.
bloeden > bloeien 'to bleed' , this one is looked down upon, since the verb becomes homophonous to bloeien 'to blossom', which gives some very odd sentences, as you can imagine. But especially in the south, people seem to have no problem with this seemingly not unimportant issue.
Some examples of the d lenition that has snuck into proper Dutch speech is:
broeder > broer 'brother' where broeder is used in a religious sense, while broer is the standard word for brother.
So in pseudo-Irish orthography goede with lenition would be written 'goedhe'.
What is special about Irish though, and as a matter of fact special for all of the Celtic languages, is that this lenition also crossed word boundaries. So feminine words ending in Pre-Celtic *ā would lenite the following word, since the word would end in a vowel.
This lenition later became grammatical, while the original lenition over word boundaries disappeared. It became grammatical because for example the Pre-Celtic *ā elided leaving only the lenition in the next word to show there once was a preceding vowel.
So let's get back on track, what happend to Dia duit vs Dia dhuit. Apparently, when lenition became grammatical rather than a typical phonological rule, either they were already greeting each other with Dia dhuit, and it lexicalised this way, or maybe some form of awareness that intervocality lenites remained, giving a way past disappearance reinsertion of lenition in the Irish language.
The first option is unlikely since the Proto-Celts definitely were not Christian, so saying 'God is with you' seems odd. So it must be the second option. It's interesting how such a long lost sound law can suddenly spasm a bit, way past its disappearance.
I hope this was remotely coherent.
