Hello.

The Gaulish language had the patronymic -ikno, rom PIE *ken- (new, young), which was frequently used. I could not find if there are any traces of ancient patronymic suffixes in Old Irish or before it.

Any advice is welcome!

Morrino

In the Ogham record you get patronymics and patronymic indicators (generally in the genitive case) like AVI "grandson" (Modern Irish Ó, and a cognate with Latin avus, "grandfather"), and MAQQI "son" (Modern Irish Mac). Even by the time of these inscriptions, these patronymic indicators had apparently become a part of the patronym itself (at least in some cases), rather than being used as descriptive words. For example, you find inscriptions like MAQQI ERCCIA MAQQI MUCOI DOVINIA "[stone] of Mac-Erce, son of the descendent of Duibne", in which the repetition of MAQQI suggests that the first instance wasn't being used as a descriptive word like "son", but more like the "Mc" or "Mac" of modern Irish surnames.

You can search through a list of common formulaic words on the Ogham in 3D website. Among them are KOI "here", MUCOI "descendant", and CELI "follower/devotee". Off the top of my head, I don't know any example containing a cognate with Gaulish -ikno.

Thank you for the website to the Ogham inscriptions. I will explore it. As for the gaelic patronymic, the lack of related suffixes while Gaulish had them, is intriguing. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

I didn't mean to suggest that Irish Ogham inscriptions lack comparable suffixes, just that I wasn't aware of any that are used in a comparable patronymic formula. If you're interested in Ogham suffixes, Damien McManus describes "diminutives" and "miscellaneous suffixes" in sections 6.12 and 6.13 of A Guide to Ogham (pp. 107-108). Now that I mention this, though, I have just had a realisation...

McManus claims that, "Diminutives in -AGNI ... formed from both nouns and adjectives are particularly common and this is the most frequently used suffix in these names: BAIDAGNI, BROCAGNI, COIMAGNI, ..." (p. 107). Because he refers to this as a diminutive, and notes its relationship to later Old Irish "-án", I had only considered this to be a Gaelic feature meaning "little" or "small" in the typical manner of diminutive suffixes. On reflection, however, it doesn't seem entirely unlikely that this could be related to, or perhaps even a cognate with Gaulish -ikno/a. It seems plausible that both could come from a common Indo-European root meaning something like "small/young", even if its use in Irish is entirely diminutive rather than indicative of a patronymic as is the case in Gaulish.

Aside from this very tentative connection, it nevertheless seems to me that in these earliest examples of written Irish, the preferred formula for patronymics was something like "X MAQI Y" or "X AVI Y", where X is the personal name and Y is the patronymic. Every word in these formulae (X, MAQI, AVI and Y) are typically in the genitive case. Professor Stifter notes in his 2020 article, Cisalpine Celtic that aside from the Gaulish suffixal formation of the patronymic, -ikno/a, another formula could also be used, namely, "the combination individual name + name of the father in the genitive" (p. 356), e.g. esopnos kepi. He does stress that secure examples of this combination are "hard to come by for Cisalpine Gaulish", and goes on to note that, unlike in Ogham inscriptions, "where the name of the father follows in the genitive, the words for “son” and “daughter” are never expressed explicitly" (p. 357). Nevertheless, this genitival construction is clearly more similar to the patronymic formulae used in Ogham inscriptions than the use of patronymic suffixes.

You might also be interested in checking out this 2008 work, also by Prof. Stifter, on the same topic, as well as Eugenio R. Luján's article, Gaulish Personal Names : An Update, in which several comparisons are made to Irish, and many cognates with Irish are identified.

Yes, thank you I took note we were speaking about patronymic suffixes. Your suggestion that Gaulish -ikno/a could be a cognate to -agni iss very feasible. By chance I have studied the PIE radical you suggest, and -ikno/a is believed to derive from PIE diminutive and genitive root *-ken (small, young), which derived to English -kin as in mannequin, small man, German -chen) like in Hänchen , cognate to Latin gen-. Thank you for sharing those valuable articles and sources, I will read them with care .