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Irish orthography has evolved over many centuries, since Old Irish was first written down in the Latin alphabet in about the 8th century AD. Prior to that, Primitive Irish was written in Ogham. Irish orthography is mainly based on etymological considerations, although a spelling reform in the mid-20th century simplified the relationship between spelling and pronunciation somewhat.
Contents
- Alphabet
- Irish scripts and typefaces
- Consonants
- Vowels
- Simple vowels
- Vowels with an acute accent
- Di and trigraphs
- Followed by bh dh gh mh
- Epenthetic vowel
- Special pronunciations in verb forms
- Diacritics
- Punctuation
- Capitalisation
- Abbreviations
- Spelling reform
- References
There are three dialects of spoken Irish: Ulster (now predominantly in County Donegal), Connacht (Counties Mayo and Galway), and Munster (Counties Kerry, Cork, and Waterford). Some spelling conventions are common to all the dialects, while others vary from dialect to dialect. In addition, individual words may have in any given dialect a pronunciation that is not reflected by the spelling. (The pronunciations in this article reflect Connacht Irish pronunciation; other accents may differ.)
Alphabet
The alphabet now used for writing the Irish language consists of the following letters of the Latin script, whether written in Roman hand or Gaelic hand:
a á b c d e é f g h i í l m n o ó p r s t u ú;The acute accent over the vowels is ignored for purposes of alphabetization. Modern loanwords also make use of j k q v w x y z. Of these, v is the most common. It occurs in a small number of words of native origin in the language such as vácarnach, vác and vrác, all of which are onomatopoeic. It also occurs in a number of alternative colloquial forms such as víog instead of bíog and vís instead of bís as cited in Niall Ó Dónaill's Foclóir Gaeilge–Béarla (Irish–English Dictionary). It is also the only non-traditional letter used to write foreign names and words adapted to the Irish language (for example, Switzerland, or Helvetia, is Gaelicised as An Eilvéis; Azerbaijan, in contrast, is written An Asarbaiseáin rather than *An Azarbaijáin). The letters j, q, w, x, y and z are used primarily in scientific terminology or direct, unaltered borrowings from English and other languages, although the phoneme /z/ does exist naturally in at least one dialect, that of West Muskerry, Co. Cork, as the eclipsis of s. k is the only letter not to be listed by Ó Dónaill. h, when not prefixed to an initial vowel as an aspirate in certain grammatical functions (or when not used as an indicator of lenition when Roman type is used), occurs primarily in loanwords as an initial consonant. The letters' names are spelt out thus:
á bé cé dé é eif gé héis í eil eim ein ó pé ear eas té ú along with jé cá cú vé wae eacs yé zae.Tree names were once popularly used to name the letters. Tradition taught that they all derived from the names of Ogham letters, though it is now known that only some of the earliest Ogham letters were named after trees.
ailm (pine), beith (birch), coll (hazel), dair (oak), edad/eadhadh (poplar), fern/fearn (alder), gath/gort (ivy), uath (hawthorn), idad/iodhadh (yew), luis (rowan), muin (vine), nin/nion (ash), onn (gorse), peith (dwarf alder), ruis (elder), sail (willow), tinne/teithne (holly), úr (heather)Irish scripts and typefaces
Prior to the middle of the 20th century, Irish was usually written using the Gaelic typefaces. This alphabet, together with Roman type equivalents and letter name pronunciations along with the additional lenited letters, is shown below.
Use of Gaelic type is today almost entirely restricted to decorative and/or self-consciously traditional contexts. The dot above the lenited letter is usually replaced by a following h in the standard Roman alphabet [for example, ċ in gaelic type becomes ch in Roman type]. The only other use of h in Irish is for vowel-initial words after certain proclitics (e.g. go hÉirinn, "to Ireland") and for words of foreign derivation such as hata "hat".
Although the Gaelic script remained common until the mid-20th century, efforts to introduce Roman characters began much earlier. Theobald Stapleton's 1639 catechism was printed in a Roman type alphabet, and also introduced simplified spellings such as suí for suidhe and uafás for uathbhás, though these did not become standard for another 300 years.
Consonants
The consonant letters generally correspond to the consonant phonemes as shown in this table. See Irish phonology for an explanation of the symbols used and Irish initial mutations for an explanation of eclipsis. In most cases, consonants are "broad" (velarised) when the nearest vowel letter is one of a, o, u and "slender" (palatalised) when the nearest vowel letter is one of e, i.
Vowels
In spite of the complex chart below, pronunciation of vowels in Irish is mostly predictable from a few simple rules:
The following chart indicates how written vowels are generally pronounced. Each dialect has certain divergences from this general scheme, and may also pronounce some words in a way that does not agree with standard orthography.
Simple vowels
Unstressed vowels are generally reduced to schwa (/ə/).
Vowels with an acute accent
Vowels with an acute accent (known in Irish as a fada or síneadh fada) are always pronounced long. In digraphs and trigraphs containing a vowel with an acute accent, only the vowel with the accent mark is normally pronounced.
Di- and trigraphs
A vowel or digraph followed by i is usually pronounced as that vowel. The i is not pronounced in that case, and just indicates that the following consonants are slender. However, it may be pronounced in the digraphs ei, oi, ui.
Exceptions:
Followed by bh, dh, gh, mh
When followed by the lenited consonants bh, dh, gh or mh, a stressed vowel usually forms a diphthong.
For aidh, aigh, adh, eadh, idh and igh, see also Special pronunciations in verb forms.
Epenthetic vowel
In a sequence of short vowel + /l, r, n/ + labial or velar consonant (except for voiceless stops) an unwritten /ə/ gets pronounced between the /l, r, n/ and the following consonant:
But:
There is additionally no epenthesis after long vowels and diphthongs:
Special pronunciations in verb forms
In verb forms, some letters and letter combinations are pronounced differently from elsewhere.
In the imperfect, conditional, and imperative, -dh is pronounced /tʲ/ before a pronoun beginning with s-:
Otherwise it is pronounced /x/:
In the preterite impersonal, -dh is pronounced /w/:
-(a)idh and -(a)igh are pronounced /ə/ before a pronoun, otherwise /iː/:
In the future and conditional, f (broad or slender) has the following effects:
- After vowels and sonorants (/l̪ˠ lʲ mˠ mʲ n̪ˠ nʲ ɾˠ ɾʲ/) it is pronounced /h/:
- molfaidh /ˈmˠɔl̪ˠhiː/ "will praise"
- dhófadh /ˈɣoːhəx/ "would burn"
- déarfaidh /ˈdʲeːɾˠhiː/ "will say"
- It makes a voiced obstruent (/bˠ bʲ vʲ d̪ˠ ɡ/) or /w/ voiceless:
- scuabfadh /ˈsˠkuəpəx/ "would sweep"
- goidfidh /ˈɡɛtʲiː/ "will steal"
- leagfadh /ˈlʲakəx/ "would lay"
- scríobhfaidh /ˈʃcɾʲiːfˠiː/ "will write"
- shnámhfadh /ˈhn̪ˠaːfˠəx/ "would swim"
- It is silent after a voicless obstruent (/k c x ç pˠ pʲ sˠ ʃ t̪ˠ tʲ/)
- brisfidh /ˈbʲɾʲɪʃiː/ "will break"
- ghlacfadh /ˈɣl̪ˠakəx/ "would accept"
- But in the future and conditional impersonal f is often /fˠ, fʲ/
- molfar /ˈmˠɔl̪ˠfˠəɾˠ/ "one will praise"
- dhófaí /ˈɣoːfˠiː/ "one would burn"
- scuabfar /ˈsˠkuəbˠfˠəɾˠ/ "one will sweep"
- brisfear /ˈbʲɾʲɪʃfʲəɾˠ/ "one will break"
In the past participle th (also t after d) is silent but makes a voiced obstruent voiceless:
Diacritics
Irish spelling makes use today of only one diacritic, and formerly used a second. The acute accent (Irish: síneadh fada "long sign") is used to indicate a long vowel, as in bád /bˠaːd̪ˠ/ "boat". However, there are some circumstances under which a long vowel is not indicated by an acute accent, namely:
The overdot (Irish: ponc séimhithe "dot of lenition", buailte "struck", or simply séimhiú, "lenition") was formerly used, especially in Gaelic script, to indicate the lenited version of a consonant; currently a following letter h is used for this purpose. Thus the letters ḃ ċ ḋ ḟ ġ ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ are equivalent to bh ch dh fh gh mh ph sh th. In Old Irish orthography, the dot was used only for ḟ ṡ, while the following h was used for ch ph th; lenition of other letters was not indicated. Later the two systems spread to the entire set of lenitable consonants and competed with each other. Eventually the standard practice was to use the dot when writing in Gaelic script and the following h when writing in Roman letters.
As with most European languages such as French, Spanish or German, Irish diacritics must be preserved in uppercase forms. If diacritics are unavailable (for example, on a computer using ASCII), there is no generally accepted standard for replacing it (unlike some languages like German, where the umlaut is replaced by a following "e" and ß is replaced by "ss"), and so it is generally just omitted entirely.
Lower-case "i" has no tittle in Gaelic script, and road signs in the Republic of Ireland, which use a typeface based on Transport, also use a dotless lowercase "i" (as well as a Latin alpha glyph for "a"). However, the tittle is generally included in printed material like books and newspapers and in electronic media like the Internet and CD-ROMs. Irish makes no graphemic distinction between dotted i and dotless ı (i.e. they are not different letters), as languages like Turkish and Azeri do.
According to Alexei Kondratiev, the dotless i was developed by monks in the manuscripts to denote the modification of the letter following it. In the word "go deimhin" for example, the first i would be dotless, softening the m, and the second dotted-i would be a normal vowel. The dotting of all i-s in Irish became a convention, as did the letter h, when the language became more usually typed than hand-written, and the limitations of the machine to accommodate a scribe's flicks and notations imposed standardization. This meant that "letters" that were more intended to modify other letters (h & dotless i) became equal letters. In this process formally notation-letters became emboldened and distracting to non-initiates. Moves in signage to replace h-s with dots, and possibly also replace dotless-i-s with under-dots for example, would clarify spelling and make words less cluttered with notation letters and easier to read. Removing notation letters (hs and dotless is) would also constitute a spelling reform without having to change the essential spellings. The dots or diacritics would take the place of distracting notational letters as was once common in the manuscripts and handwriting prior to keyboards.
Punctuation
In general, punctuation marks are used in Irish much as they are in English. One punctuation mark worth noting is the Tironian et ⁊ which is generally used to abbreviate the word agus "and", much as the ampersand is generally used to abbreviate the word and in English.
The hyphen (Irish: fleiscín) is used in Irish after the letters t and n when these are attached to a vowel-initial word through the rules of the initial mutations, as in an t-arán "the bread", a n-iníon "their daughter". However, the hyphen is not used when the vowel is capitalised, as in an tAlbanach "the Scotsman", Ár nAthair "Our Father". No hyphen is used with the h that is attached to a vowel-initial word: a hiníon "her daughter".
The hyphen is also used in compound words under certain circumstances:
The apostrophe (Irish: uaschama) is used to indicate an omitted vowel in the following cases:
Capitalisation
Capitalisation rules are similar to English. However, a prefix letter remains in lowercase when the base initial is capitalised (an tSín "China"). For text written in all caps, the prefix letter is often kept in lowercase, or small caps (STAIR NA HÉIREANN "THE HISTORY OF IRELAND"). An initial capital is used for:
Abbreviations
Irish has a number of abbreviations, most of which, like lch. for leathanach ("p."/"page") and m.sh. for mar shampla ("e.g."/"for example" "exempli gratia") are straightforward. Two that may require explanation are .i. (which begins and ends with a full stop) for eadhon ("i.e."/"that is") and ⁊rl. or srl. for agus araile ("etc."/"and so forth" "et cetera").
Spelling reform
The literary Classical Irish which survived till the 17th century was already archaic and its spelling reflected that; Theobald Stapleton's 1639 catechism was a first attempt at simplification. The classical spelling represented a dialect continuum including distinctions lost in all surviving dialects by the Gaelic revival of the late 19th century. The issue of simplifying spelling, linked to the use of Roman or Gaelic type, was controversial in the early decades of the 20th century. The Irish Texts Society's 1904 Irish–English bilingual dictionary by Patrick S. Dinneen used traditional spellings. After the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, all Acts of the Oireachtas were translated into Irish, initially using Dinneen's spellings, with a list of simplifications accruing over the years. When Éamon de Valera became President of the Executive Council after the 1932 election, policy reverted to older spellings, which were used in the enrolled text of the 1937 Constitution. In 1941, de Valera decided to publish a "popular edition" of the Constitution with simplified spelling and established a committee of experts, which failed to agree on recommendations. Instead, the Oireachtas' own translation service prepared a booklet, Litriú na Gaeilge: Lámhleabhar an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil, published in 1945. The following are some old spellings criticised by T. F. O'Rahilly and their simplifications:
The booklet was expanded in 1947, and republished in 1957 combined with the standard grammar of 1953. It attracted initial criticism as unhistorical and artificial; some spellings fail to represent the pronunciation of some dialects, while others preserve letters not pronounced in any dialect. Its status was reinforced by use in the civil service and as a guide for Tomás de Bhaldraithe's 1959 English–Irish dictionary and Niall Ó Dónaill's 1977 Irish–English dictionary. A review of the written standard, including spelling, was initiated in 2010, with a view to improving "simplicity, internal consistency, and logic".