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Irish orthography is the set of conventions used to write Irish. A spelling reform in the mid-20th century led to An Caighdeán Oifigiúil, the modern standard written form used by the Government of Ireland, which regulates both spelling and grammar.
- Notable Characteristics
- Classification
- Sources
- Phonology
- Orthography
- History
- Grammar
- See Also
- Bibliography
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Notable characteristics of Old Irish compared with other old Indo-European languages, are: 1. Initial mutations, including lenition, nasalisation and aspiration/gemination. 2. A complex system of verbal allomorphy. 3. A system of conjugated prepositionsthat is unusual in Indo-European languages but common to Celtic languages. There is a great deal ...
Old Irish was the only member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, which is, in turn, a subfamily of the wider Indo-European language family that also includes the Slavonic, Italic/Romance, Indo-Aryan and Germanic subfamilies, along with several others. Old Irish is the ancestor of all modern Goidelic languages: Modern Irish, Scottish Ga...
Relatively little survives in the way of strictly contemporary sources. They are represented mainly by shorter or longer glosses on the margins or between the lines of religious Latin manuscripts, most of them preserved in monasteries in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France and Austria, having been taken there by early Irish missionaries. Whereas in...
Consonants
The consonant inventory of Old Irish is shown in the chart below. The complexity of Old Irish phonology is from a four-way split of phonemes inherited from Primitive Irish, with both a fortis–lenis and a "broad–slender" (velarised vs. palatalised) distinction arising from historical changes. The sounds /f v θ ð x ɣ h ṽ n l r/ are the broad lenis equivalents of broad fortis /p b t d k ɡ s m N L R/; likewise for the slender (palatalised) equivalents. (However, most /f fʲ/ sounds actually derive...
Vowels
Old Irish had distinctive vowel length in both monophthongs and diphthongs. Short diphthongs were monomoraic, taking up the same amount of time as short vowels, while long diphthongs were bimoraic, the same as long vowels. (This is much like the situation in Old English but different from Ancient Greek whose shorter and longer diphthongs were bimoraic and trimoraic, respectively: /ai/ vs. /aːi/.) The inventory of Old Irish long vowels changed significantly over the Old Irish period, but the s...
Stress
Stress is generally on the first syllable of a word. However, in verbs it occurs on the second syllable when the first syllable is a clitic (the verbal prefix as- in as·beir /asˈberʲ/ "he says"). In such cases, the unstressed prefix is indicated in grammatical works with a following centre dot(·).
As with most medieval languages, the orthography of Old Irish is not fixed, so the following statements are to be taken as generalisations only. Individual manuscriptsmay vary greatly from these guidelines. The Old Irish alphabet consists of the following eighteen letters of the Latin alphabet: 1. a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, ...
Old Irish underwent extensive phonological changes from Proto-Celtic in both consonants and vowels. Final syllables were lost or transphonologizedas grammatical mutations on the following word. In addition, unstressed syllables faced various reductions and deletions of their vowels.
Old Irish is a fusional, nominative-accusative, and VSOlanguage. Nouns decline for 5 cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, prepositional, vocative; 3 genders: masculine, feminine, neuter; 3 numbers: singular, dual, plural. Adjectives agree with nouns in case, gender, and number. The prepositional case is called the dativeby convention. Verbs con...
Beekes, Robert (1995). Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction.Fortson, Benjamin W., IV (2004). Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction.Green, Antony (1995). Old Irish Verbs and Vocabulary. Somerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press. ISBN 1-57473-003-7.Kortlandt, Frederik Herman Henri (2007). Italo-Celtic Origins and the Prehistory of the Irish Language. Leiden Studies in Indo-European. Vol. 14. Rodopi. ISBN 978-9042021778.Old Irish dictionary Archived 30 April 2016 at the Wayback MachineOld Irish Online by Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel and Jonathan Slocum, free online lessons at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at AustineDIL (digital edition of the Dictionary of the Irish Language)- 6th century–10th century; evolved into Middle Irish by around the 10th century
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The history of the Irish language begins with the period from the arrival of speakers of Celtic languages in Ireland to Ireland's earliest known form of Irish, Primitive Irish, which is found in Ogham inscriptions dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD.
Irish Orthography (Litriú na Gaeilge) The orthography of Irish is at first a bit confusing. In addition, the pronunciation and written Irish are not identical, especially the pronunciation varies from dialect to dialect. Although, the order in which letters appear is not random, but follows specific rules. One can just as well develop a ...
Scottish Gaelic orthography has evolved over many centuries and is heavily etymologizing in its modern form. This means the orthography tends to preserve historical components rather than operating on the principles of a phonemic orthography where the graphemes correspond directly to phonemes.
Irish orthography has evolved over many centuries: since old Irish was first written down in the Latin alphabet circa the sixth century AD. Prior to that primitive Irish was written in Ogham . The origin of Gaelic Gael + Ic represents Scots-Gaelic as a derivative of Gaidheal from 1590-1600. [iii]
