Editing Old Irish (section)

==Classification==
Old Irish was the only known member of the [[Goidelic]] branch of the [[Celtic languages]], which is, in turn, a subfamily of the wider [[Indo-European language]] family that also includes the [[Slavonic languages|Slavonic]], [[Italic languages|Italic]]/[[Romance languages|Romance]], [[Indo-Aryan languages|Indo-Aryan]] and [[Germanic languages|Germanic]] subfamilies, along with several others. Old Irish is the ancestor of all modern Goidelic languages: [[Irish language|Modern Irish]], [[Scottish Gaelic]] and [[Manx language|Manx]].

A still older form of Irish is known as [[Primitive Irish]]. Fragments of Primitive Irish, mainly personal names, are known from inscriptions on stone written in the [[Ogham]] alphabet. The inscriptions date from about the 4th to the 6th centuries. Primitive Irish appears to have been very close to [[Proto-Celtic language|Common Celtic]], the ancestor of all [[Celtic languages]], and it had a lot of the characteristics of other archaic Indo-European languages.