mordern Irish spelling of mutated intial consonants

stephanus

Does anyone know why mutated consonants are spelled with the mutated one preceding the original one in modern Irish?
It is rather peculiar, I think. Welsh doesn't do it and neither was it like this in Old Irish, as far as I can see. Old Irish often did not even use a different letter for mutated forms.

Micilin Muc

stephanus wrote: »

Does anyone know why mutated consonants are spelled with the mutated one preceding the original one in modern Irish?
It is rather peculiar, I think. Welsh doesn't do it and neither was it like this in Old Irish, as far as I can see. Old Irish often did not even use a different letter for mutated forms.

Can you give an example?

Enkidu

For a combination of reasons. An example of what you are talking about from old manuscripts would be:

claideb (sword)
co claidiub (with a sword)

Even though c went to g, which we would now spell gc, in Old Irish there was no spelling difference.

First of all, in Old Irish the pronounciation was a little bit different, so for instance the urú on b, making it mb, was actually pronounced mb, not m. So the b was sufficient because mb was considered a type of b.
Eventually it completely became m, so it was necessary to write m before the word.

Other letters like c, were just revised to gc as part of the shift in spelling due to mb becoming m. Basically "If we have to write one urú like this, let's write them all like this".

stephanus

for example: "ar an mbord" has the original consonant "b" and its mutated form "m" before it. Or "sa gcaoi" with the mutated form "g" preceding "c".

That makes it look very interesting an easier to find a word in a dictionary. Still, it is a very unusual characteristic of Irish.

In Welsh only the mutated consonant is written: merch (a girl) but: y ferch (the girl). Being a Celtic language does not mean it has to work along the same lines but I had peep in a primer of Old Irish and there it is the same principle, either only the mutated form is written or NO mutation is indicated in writing.

stephanus

Oops! I saw your explanation only after I had added my text, Enkidu.

So, it came about by analogy with b being pronounced mb then spelling adjusted later on to pronounciation?

Enkidu

stephanus wrote: »

Oops! I saw your explanation only after I had added my text, Enkidu.

So, it came about by analogy with b being pronounced mb then spelling adjusted later on to pronounciation?

That's roughly part of the explanation. The full explanation is a bit longer. I'll type it up later today, as there are historical aspects to it that I don't fully remember, so I'll have to look at my notes.

stephanus

Do you know Old Irish?

Enkidu

stephanus wrote: »

Do you know Old Irish?

I know some. I'd be much more comfortable with its grammar than its vocabulary.

dubhthach

I would think the only way to change it would be to introduce some sort of special diacritic to mark that the new sound (m instead of b) is there due to initial consonant mutation. Of course I don't think that would ever happen.

In general though I think Irish could do with more diacritics. For example in Romanian schwa is marked with a breve eg. ă

If you were to introduce a breve in Irish you could use it for unstressed vowels, so you'd have: ă, ŏ, ŭ, ĭ, ĕ
Eg.(examples taken from Wiki)

mála /ˈmˠaːl̪ˠə/ -> málă
míle /ˈmʲiːlʲə/ -> mílĕ
faoistin /ˈfˠiːʃtʲənʲ/ -> faoistĭn
cothrom /ˈkɔɾˠəmˠ/ -> cothrŏm
agus /ˈaɡəs/ -> agŭs

Of course if you wanted to be even more innovative you could have a diacritic that marked consonant slenderness.
Şán instead of Seán anybody?

Of course I would think the breve would be a considerably less interruptive addition.

deirdremf

stephanus wrote: »

Does anyone know why mutated consonants are spelled with the mutated one preceding the original one in modern Irish?
It is rather peculiar, I think. Welsh doesn't do it and neither was it like this in Old Irish, as far as I can see. Old Irish often did not even use a different letter for mutated forms.

As Enkidu said, in old irish it wasn't shown; at a later date, some urús at least were represented by a double consonant e.g. i cceart where we now write i gceart.
However it came about, it's very handy when using a dictionary, as you don't have to know the mutation rule to work out the original initial consonant - provided you know that the mutation is there.

Enkidu

Okay, full explanation.

The original Old Irish value for letters was taken from the way British Latin was pronounced. So the letter b for example, was intended to be pronounced similar to b in the British dialect of Latin. This allowed b to stand in place of mb because its British Latin value was close to the value for b.

As I said before, eventually mb became too different to keep doing this and was changed. However c and other letters still didn't show eclipses.

Eventually this became too confusing as well, in the early 14th century some people began to show eclipses on all letters. This didn't catch on until the printing press was invented and by pure luck the first person to publish a printed book in Irish was from a Bardic school which practised showing eclipses on all letters.

Enkidu

dubhthach wrote: »

Of course if you wanted to be even more innovative you could have a diacritic that marked consonant slenderness.
Şán instead of Seán anybody?

Of course I would think the breve would be a considerably less interruptive addition.

I really like that idea for one reason: slender r. If it had an accent on it then you would have an an obvious sign that it is not the same as the English r.
Of course then you are changing the orthography for learners. What do any native speakers here think?

dubhthach

Enkidu wrote: »

I really like that idea for one reason: slender r. If it had an accent on it then you would have an an obvious sign that it is not the same as the English r.
Of course then you are changing the orthography for learners. What do any native speakers here think?

Latvian use to use an r-cedilla eg. Ŗ / ŗ so it's in unicode at the moment.
Slovak has a Ŕ/ŕ so if it or Ŗ / ŗ were used it wouldn't require designing a completely new character and all the issues regarding that from an IT point of view. (Unicode is great!)

stephanus

@Enkidu: Thanks for looking through your notes and explaining here. I can see the point. Once again I am awed by the "interconnectedness of all things", say the fact that British Latin had an influence on the way Irish is spelled today.

As for me, I think that the way Irish is spelled is very clever. Just think the way over sixty sounds are represented by only twenty odd letters! It even allows for regional variants to be spelled in the same way but pronounced in a completely different one. I would like to have that, too, in German, I wouldn't have to strife to put our dialect into some kind of legible orthography when conversing with my sister and my parents.