Irish/Alphabet

General Information

Irish

1. History
2. Alphabet
3. Spelling
4. Pronunciation
5. Grammatical Changes
6. Basic Sentence Structure
7. The Article
8. Nouns
9. Verbs
10. Commonly Confused Words
11. Compound Prepositions
12. Prefixes
13. Dictionaries
14. Other Resources
15. Common phrases
16. Vocabulary

Alphabet - An Aibítir===

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

Variations of a, e, i, o and u also exist in Irish, and they denote a longer pronunciation of the letter they resemble:

Á á, É é, Í í, Ó ó, Ú ú

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.

Gaelaċ (Gaelach), the adjective meaning "Gaelic"

Corcaigh, the name of the city of Cork

The Old Spelling and Punctum Delens: A Note - An Seanlitriú agus an Ponc Séimhithe: Tabhair faoi Deara!

Until the end of the nineteen forties, Irish was printed in a special typeface called Gaelic type, essentially a printed representation of medieval manuscript letters. A salient feature of this type was the punctum delens, a dot over a consonant letter, such as ċ or ġ. In contemporary Irish, the punctum delens isn't used any more. The punctum delens was used in order to indicate a modification of pronunciation called séimhiú or lenition (in older textbooks, it was mistakenly called aspiration, which is in proper linguistic usage something entirely different). It could appear over the letters b, c, d, f, g, m, p, s, and t. Nowadays, lenition is indicated by adding a h after the lenited consonant.

The Gaelic typeface and punctum delens are strongly linked with the older spelling, which was less phonetic than the spelling we use today, and more about being historically correct. Thus, it was cluttered with mute letters. Modern spelling can be used with the Gaelic typeface and punctum delens, but this is extremely rare - mostly you can count on all books in Gaelic type being in the old spelling. In fact, there seems to be just one book around printed in Gaelic type with punctum delens, but using a modern spelling - Niall Ó Dónaill's Na Glúnta Rosannacha.