a'

I.

the, at; See an, the, and ag, at.

II.

an, a'

the, Irish an, Old Irish in (mas. and fem.), a n- (neut.); a t- appears before vowels in the nom. masc. (an t-athair), and it is part of the article stem; a Celtic sendo-s (m.), sendâ (f.), san (n.). Sendo-s is composed of two pronominal roots, dividing into sen-do-; sen, judging by the neuter san, is a fixed neuter nom. or acc. from the Celtic root se (Indo-European sjo, beside so-, allied to Anglo-Saxon se, the, seó, now she. The -do- of sendo-s has been referred by Thurneysen and Brugmann to the pron. root to- (English tha-t, Greek $$Gtó); it is suggested that to- may have degenerated into do- before it was stuck to the fixed form sen. Sen-to- could not, on any principle otherwise, whether of accentuation or what not, produce the historical forms. It is best to revert to the older etymology, and refer do- to the pronominal root appearing in the Latin fixed cases (enclitic) -dam, -dem, (qui-dam, i-dem, etc.), the Greek $$G dé, $$G-de (as in $$Go$$`/-de, this), Church Slavonic da, he. The difference, then, between Greek $$Go$$`/-de and Gaelic sen-do-s is this: the Greek inflects the first element ( $$Go$$`= so) and keeps the $$G de fixed, whereas Gaelic reverses the matter by fixing the sen and inflecting the do-; otherwise the roots are the same ultimatley, and used for almost similar purposes.