428 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
of tlie verb shows tlie * relatival' relation, but the subject of the 
relative verb is manifested by the verbal ending. 
Therefore, ambiguity can rarely arise, if the proper construc- 
tion is observed; and the instance of ambiguity given by 
O'Donovan [Gr.,^. 378) is owing entirely to grammatical error. 
He says : " An yeis\\ a buxMtex^]" may mean either * the man ivJio 
strikes,' or * the man whom I struck.' " But this is to obliterate 
the distinctions, and ignore the functions, of the verbal forms, 
viz. : — 
A11 yeA]\ buAiteAf, . . 'the man who strikes.' 
An yeA]\ no buAileAf, . 'the man whom I struck.' 
Here the unhappy insertion of a, and the still more unhappy 
option of is for the per/, prefix "oo, ruin the construction. 
Again, when O'Donovan employs -pe^^iA buxMt me as 
* the man who struck me/ or * the man whom I struck,' he intro- 
duces a needless ambiguity, for the latter should be -pe-^-p "oo 
bu^xiieAf, with the indispensable perfect-prefix 'oo. 
In fact this a is really only *oo misspelt : — 
' The man who struck him,' . . aii -peAp "00 buAi'L e. 
' The man (whom) he struck,' . An feA-f\ "oo buAit fe. 
The x)o 18 simply the sign of the 2^ast tense, but in pronun- 
ciation the *o is constantly thinned off into the aspirated x), 
and often disappears in sound altogether; hence this '00 con- 
stantly appears as a, for ('o)o; but this proclitic is not a rela- 
tive. 
Three particles are constantly in modern books brought into 
operation quite wrongly to act as a visible relative pronoun, 
viz. X)o, is, and noc. Of these x)o is not a relative at all; a is 
only a relative when governed by a preposition ; and noc is an 
indefinite pronoun in the dative case [Old Ir. nom. nach; gen. 
neich ; dat. neuch, growing into later do neoch, and so {do) noch, 
de eo-quod^. * The man who praises me' is xsn -pe^jA TriotA.-p 
me, and not a mot-Os-p, or X)o rootcsy, or noc mol^i^, or any 
other form whatever : the relative p)resent is simply rholxsj-. 
