Irish orthography


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.
There are three main dialect areas of spoken Irish: Ulster, Connacht, and Munster. Some spelling conventions are common to all three dialects, while others vary from dialect to dialect. In addition, individual words may have in a given dialect pronunciations that are not reflected by their spelling.

Alphabet

The traditional standard Irish alphabet consists of 18 letters: a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u. Thus, it does not contain the following letters used in English: j, k, q, v, w, x, y, z. The vowels may be accented as follows: á é í ó ú.
The acute accent over the vowels, called síneadh fada, 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, and, all of which are onomatopoeic. It also occurs in a number of alternative colloquial forms such as víog instead of and vís instead of as cited in Niall Ó Dónaill's Foclóir Gaeilge–Béarla. It is also the only non-traditional letter used to write foreign names and words adapted to the Irish language. 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 does exist naturally in at least one dialect, that of West Muskerry, County 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, occurs primarily in loanwords as an initial consonant. The letters' names are spelt out thus:
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.

Irish scripts and typefaces

Prior to the middle of the 20th century, Irish was usually written using Gaelic script. This typeface, 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 . The only other use of h in Irish is for vowel-initial words after certain proclitics 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 for and for, 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" when the nearest vowel letter is one of a, o, u and "slender" when the nearest vowel letter is one of e, i.

Vowels

Sequences of vowels are common in Irish spelling due to the "caol le caol agus leathan le leathan" rule. This rule states that the vowels on either side of any consonant must be both slender or both broad, to unambiguously determine the consonant's own broad vs. slender pronunciation.
An apparent exception is the combination ae, which is followed by a broad consonant despite the e.
In spite of the complex chart below, pronunciation of vowels in Irish is mostly predictable from a few simple rules.
The following series of charts 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.

Vowels with an acute accent

Vowels with an acute accent are always pronounced long. In digraphs and trigraphs containing a vowel with an acute, only the vowel with the accent mark is usually pronounced, but there are several exceptions, for instance in trigraphs where the two letters without an accent are right next to one another rather than on either side of the accented vowel.
LetterPhonemeExamples
ábán "white"
áidáil "assembly", gabháil "taking"
aímaígh "claim", gutaí "vowels"
aíonaíonán "infant", beannaíonn "blesses"
aoúnaoú "ninth"
ésé "he"
éadéanamh "doing", buidéal "bottle"
eáSeán "John", caisleán "castle"
eáimeáin "middles", caisleáin "castles"
éiscéimh "beauty", páipéir "papers"
ígnímh "act, deed", cailín 'girl'
íosíol "seed"
iábián "size"
iáiliáin "trowel"
iósióg "fairy", pióg "pie"
ióigrióir "weakling"
iúsiúl "walk", bailiú "gathering"
iúiciúin "quiet", inniúil "able, fit"
ópóg "kiss", armónach "harmonic"
óimóin "sod, turf", bádóir "boatman"
oícroíleacán "core"
oíocroíonna "hearts"
útús "beginning"
úisúil "eye", cosúil "like, resembling"
uáruán "buckwheat", duán "kidney, fishhook"
uáifuáil "sewing, stitching"
uíbuígh "turn yellow"
uíobuíon "band, troop"
uócruóg "urgent need"
uóiluóige "pollock"

Fada vowels will occasionally also appear in succession, where adjacent vowels are not pronounced: séú "sixth", ríúil "royal, kingly, majestic", báíocht "sympathy", etc.

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.

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 vowels

In the sequence of short vowel + + labial, palatal, or velar consonant within the same morpheme, an unwritten gets inserted between the and the following consonant:
But:
There is additionally no epenthesis after long vowels and diphthongs:
The rules of epenthesis do not apply across morpheme boundaries :
In verb forms, some letters and letter combinations are pronounced differently from elsewhere.
In the imperfect, conditional, and imperative, -dh is pronounced before a pronoun beginning with s-:
Otherwise it is pronounced :
In the preterite impersonal, -dh is pronounced :
-idh and -igh are pronounced before a pronoun, otherwise :
In the future and conditional, f has the following effects:
  1. After vowels and sonorants it is pronounced :
  2. *molfaidh "will praise"
  3. *dhófadh "would burn"
  4. *déarfaidh "will say"
  5. It makes a voiced obstruent voiceless; and makes turn into :
  6. *scuabfadh "would sweep"
  7. *goidfidh "will steal"
  8. *leagfadh "would lay"
  9. *scríobhfaidh "will write"
  10. *shnámhfadh "would swim"
  11. It is silent after a voiceless obstruent
  12. *brisfidh "will break"
  13. *ghlacfadh "would accept"
  14. But in the future and conditional impersonal f is often
  15. *molfar "one will praise"
  16. *dhófaí "one would burn"
  17. *scuabfar "one will sweep"
  18. *brisfear "one will break"
In the past participle th is silent but makes a voiced obstruent voiceless:
Irish spelling makes use today of only one diacritic, and formerly used a second. The acute accent is used to indicate a long vowel, as in bád "boat". However, there are some circumstances under which a long vowel is not indicated by an acute, namely:
The overdot 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, there is no generally accepted standard for replacing it, and so it is generally just omitted entirely or replaced with an apostrophe.
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. However, as printed and electronic material like books, newspapers and web pages use Roman hand almost invariably, the tittle is generally shown but it is not a diacritic and has no significance..
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 every occurrence of i in Irish became a convention, as did the letter h, when the language became more usually typed than handwritten, 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 became equal letters. In this process formally notation letters became emboldened and distracting to non-initiates. Moves in signage to replace instances of h with dots, and possibly also replace dotless i with an under-dot, for example, would clarify spelling and make words less cluttered with notation letters and easier to read. Removing notation letters 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 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 is used in Irish after the letters t and n when these are attached to a masculine 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 is used to indicate an omitted vowel in the following cases:
rules are similar to English. However, a prefix letter remains in lowercase when the base initial is capitalised. For text written in all caps, the prefix letter is often kept in lowercase, or small caps.
An initial capital is used for:
Irish has a number of abbreviations, most of which, like lch. for leathanach and m.sh. for mar shampla are straightforward. Two that may require explanation are .i. for eadhon and ⁊rl. or srl. for agus araile.

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 as An Caighdeán Oifigiúil in 1958, 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 announced in 2010, with a view to improving "simplicity, internal consistency, and logic". The result was the 2017 updated Caighdeán Oifigiúil.