Archive for April, 2007

Lenition is one of the two mutations that Irish words undergo, and it can be a very tricky topic for many people.
Anciently, lenition marks where a word was preceded by another word that ended in a vowel. Over time, being stuck between two vowels caused a weakening or “lightening” of the sound of the consonant. In linguistic terms, the consonant became a “spirant.” Rather than being a stop, where the teeth, tongue and lips stop air from leaving your mouth as you make the sound, the form of the sound changed to allow air through.

Use of the Genetive Form

The genitive case, in general, is used to take Noun A and use it to describe, define, limit, or modify Noun B. The genitive case is a signal that Noun A is related to Noun B in a close and intimate way: in English we express the relation in terms of possession, origin, material, belonging and membership, and the like.

When counting objects, the words for numbers change.

The next major use of the copula is what we call fronting

Perhaps one of the most frustrating features of Irish to the beginner is the two different verbs for “to be.”

The typical way of expressing “I am a teacher” (for example) would be to use the copula: Is múinteoir mé – iss MOON-chore may

Fifteen of the “simple” Irish prepositions are conjugated for pronoun they refer to. For example, to say “to me,” you can’t just have “do mé.” You use the conjugated form “dom.”

I’ve decided to start this thread for those seeking help with pronunciation. Simply type in the Irish word you need a pronunciation for and other volunteers to the site will add a phonetic rendering of that word in a dialect of Irish that they are comfortable wtih.

Long Vowels

These are always pronounced this way, whatever their position in a word. Often, the vowels marked with the sineadh fada (áéíú) will be written with another short vowel before or after it. This generally does not affect the pronunciation, but it written to obey the rule of broad vowels with broad consonants, and slender vowels with slender consonants.

How do I write something in Irish?

Modern Irish uses the regular latin alphabet, so any normal font will work fine, as long as it has the accented vowels — which most do. You can experiment with all kinds of fonts here: http://www.ellipsix.net/textwriter/render.jsp

The pronunciation of Irish varies widely throughout Ireland, but there are three principal dialects (Munster, Connaught, and Ulster) and each of them have more things in common with each other than differences. What follows is a general layout of how the letter combinations in Irish are pronounced, with a bias toward the Connaught dialect.

The Irish Gaelic alphabet is made up of the following letters:

Gaelic (Irish) is a Celtic language and, as such, is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. Within the Celtic group, it belongs to the Goidelic branch of insular Celtic. Irish has evolved from a form of Celtic which was introduced into Ireland at some period during the great Celtic migrations of antiquity between the end of the second millennium and the fourth century BC. Old Irish, Ireland’s vernacular when the historical period begins in the sixth century of our era, is the earliest variant of the Celtic languages, and indeed the earliest of European vernaculars north of the Alps, in which extensive writings are extant.The Norse settlements (AD 800 onwards) and the Anglo-Norman colonization (AD 1169 onwards) introduced periods of new language diversity into Ireland, but Irish remained dominant and other speech communities were gradually assimilated. In the early sixteenth century, almost all of the population was Irish-speaking. The main towns, however, prescribed English for the formal conduct of administrative and legal business.

Firstly submitted by: Abigeál