Irish/Alphabet
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[edit] General Information
- History
- Alphabet
- Spelling
- Pronunciation
- Grammatical Changes
- Basic Sentence Structure
- The Article
- Nouns
- Verbs
- Commonly Confused Words
- Compound Prepositions
- Prefixes
- Dictionaries
- Other Resources
- Common phrases
- Vocabulary
[edit] Alphabet
Irish uses the Latin alphabet. The basic alphabet consists of 18 letters:
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u
In addition to these letters, six others (j, q, v, w, x, z) are used in words borrowed from other languages. The letters are usually called by their English names, except that the letter a is called "ah".
When books were first printed in Irish Type, the fonts used were based on the handwritten scripts of the time (16th Century) as they were for all other languages. A feature of the Irish manuscripts was the use of special marks to indicate sounds that were not well represented with Roman letters. The most common mark was used to indicate the softening of a consonant by putting a dot above the consonant. (This is similar to the umlaut in German, which represents a vowel vocalised forward of its usual location in the mouth.) This is known in Irish as a seimhiú (softening); grammarians call it lenition. It was also known as "buailte" - struck. There were very few books published in Irish until the Irish Language Revival started in the late 19th/early 20th Century. Up until the 1960s, most books were printed using fonts modelled on uncial handwriting. Eventually these were replaced by the Latin fonts for reasons of practicality with the dot above the letter replaced by a 'h' after the letter, but the Gaelic script is still used decoratively. With the ease of use of true type fonts on PCs the old fonts, known as "seanchló" (Old Type) or Cló Gaelach (Gaelic Type) have undergone a renaissance.
