frith-

• fri- (before t)

From Old Irish frith- (“counter-, beside, against”), from the verbal nouns of Old Irish verbs like fris·beir, fris·aicci, fris·indlea with the initial preverb fri, from Proto-Celtic *writ- (compare Welsh wrth, prefix gwrth-), from the zero grade of Proto-Indo-European *wert- (“to turn”) (compare Latin versus (“against”)).

frith-

1. anti-, counter-

   Synonym: anta-

2. back

   Synonym: cúl-

• Ó Dónaill, Niall (1977) “frith-”, in Foclóir Gaeilge–Béarla, Dublin: An Gúm, →ISBN

• fre-, fri- (before stops)
• fris-, fres- (before resonants)

From Proto-Celtic *writ- (compare Welsh wrth, prefix gwrth-), from the zero grade of Proto-Indo-European *wert- (“to turn”) (compare Latin versus (“against”)).

• IPA^(key): [ɸʲrʲiθʲ]

frith- (pretonic fris-)

1. counter-, beside, against

There are three basic shapes of the prefix, used in the following manner:

• Frith- proper manifests as such before morpheme-initial vowels.

  ‎frith- (“beside”) + ‎aire (“watching”) → ‎frithaire (“vigil”, literally “watching beside”)

  ‎frith- + ‎orcun (“striking down”) → ‎frithorcun (“injury”)

• Fris- and fres- tend to appear before resonants. Originally fres- was created by a following vowel lowering the vowel in older fris-, but by Old Irish times the two variants were interchangeable.
• Fre- and fri- were used before stops. Like with fris- and fres-, the distribution of these two variants originally depended on whether the following morpheme caused its original -i- to lower to -e-, but by the Old Irish period this distribution was not strictly followed. It triggered no mutation of the next morpheme in line.

  ‎frith- (“beside”) + ‎cor (“putting”) → ‎frecor (“cultivation, worship”)

  ‎frith- (“against”) + ‎tuidecht (“coming”) → ‎frituidecht (“opposition”, literally “coming against”)

Later on, the non-frith- forms became fossilized as frith- overtook the other shapes in productivity. Frith- also caused lenition of the initial consonant of a following morpheme as this happened. For instance, ‎frith- + ‎gním (“work”) → ‎frithgnam (“pains, labour, work”).

• Middle Irish: frith-
  • Irish: frith-
  • Scottish Gaelic: frith-

From frith.

frith-

1. by-, sub-
2. counter-