How is gaelic written

According to the census , 1. In the UK census found that , people in Northern Ireland Irish is the main home language for about 4, people in Northern Ireland [ source ]. According to another source , there are about 9, fluent speakers of Irish in Britain. Whether this includes Northern Ireland is not clear. According to the US census, about 18, people spoke Irish at home in the USA, especially in the northeastern states. In 1, people in Australia said that they use Irish as their home language, and it is possible to study Modern and Old Irish at the University of Sydney [ source ].

Before the spelling reform, this was spelled Gaedhilge. Irish is a member of the Goidelic branch of Celtic languages, also known as Q-Celtic. There is some degree of mutual intelligibility between them, particular between the Scottish Gaelic of Islay and Argyll, Ulster Irish, and Manx. The grammar and vocabulary of these languages are quite similar, but the spelling and pronunciation are different, especially Manx spelling.

The Celtic languages all have a similar grammatical structure, but have relatively little vocabulary in common. The main area where the Ulster dialect is spoken is the Rosses na Rosa. So aonach and coire are both valid words, but not aonech or core.

After a while, these sorts of words just start to look wrong. When many - but not all - consonants are surrounded by slender vowels called a slender consonant , they change their sounds to sound as though they have a Y following them. Consonants do exactly the same in English when followed by a U.

Thus the initial sounds of the words ceann , dearg are the same as the initial sounds of cure , dune. There is also a distinction that needs to be understood in certain places between back vowels vowels that sound in the back of the mouth, that is 'aw', 'ur', 'oo', 'ow', 'aa', 'o', 'u', 'a' and front vowels everything else.

Gaelic words are stressed on the first syllable. There, that was simple. The whole discussion about vowels only applies in stressed i. Gaelic uses the grave accent on vowels, so suddenly we have ten to cope with. The use of the accent is consistent though and just signifies a longer version of the vowel. A like in cat , or more accurately, like the first part of the vowel in cow. Well, I wanted to start you off with the easy ones. H as in English, but only when it's found in isolation which isn't often.

When it comes after a consonant, it modifies the sound of the preceding consonant instead of having a sound of its own. See below. P , T and C ; as in English, except that in the middle or end of words you should add a very slight 'kh' sound before them, almost no more than a little extra breath. That 'kh' is the back of the throat sound as in loch or German Bach. Practise it. B , D and G ; as in English only at the beginnings of words. Elsewhere they sound like English P, T and C respectively.

R and RR ; rolled, and never left out. If you can't roll your R's and I can't you can approximate a single tap of the roll which is all most Gaels ever say anyway by bending your tongue back until the underside of the tongue is touching the roof of your mouth, and then flicking the tongue forward while trying to say an English R.

The tongue should catch behind the teeth, producing a sharp tapping sound rather unlike the English R. CH ; as in loch or German Bach. If you can't make this sound, you might as well give up now, because there's no surer sign that you're a Sassenach than being unable to pronounce loch as anything other than 'lock'. You can tell if your vocal cords are vibrating or not by placing your hand against your throat and seeing if you can feel a buzzing sensation.

It's a bit like gargling, or sitting on a G for several seconds. For example, thuilm 'hoolim'. Therefore aird 'aarsht'. As discussed above, in most cases, 'slenderising' a consonant just involves sticking a Y after it. The difficulty for English speakers is ending a word with this kind of slenderised sound. Writing out the pronunciations for these things isn't easy either! Slender CH is pronounced like the German ich ; that is to say, rather like an H and a Y run together and said with more force.

Slender GH and DH are a voiced version of the above, i. It can sound rather like a severely overdone Y. L only slenderises at the beginning of a word. N only slenderises initially or after a back vowel. This reluctance was in part irrational and no doubt it had some basis in Anglophobia. That the French, among others, managed to write their language in the "English" alphabet and that their language remained as Gallic as ever was clearly mysterious!

There was a slightly more sane argument that the realisation of lenition seimhiu as an "h" rather than the use of the "buailte" lengthened the words. The argument in favour of the "English" alphabet - that nearly every office in the country had an English typewriter and only a minority had Irish ones and that once the use of the "English" alphabet to write Irish was accepted every office would have the equipment to write in both languages on the one machine - could not be contradicted with conviction.

It needed only that the alphabet in question be given its more correct name, the Roman or Latin alphabet. Those proposing its use also pointed out that in Old Irish "h" and not the "litir buailte" was used. In fact in Old Irish ch th and ph are used but lenition of f and s is shown by the buailte method and lenition is not shown in the case of g d b and m.

And the h is often written above not after the letter in the Middle Ages and in this case it is normally very small. The reason why s and f were buailte is that under lenition they have little or no sound and in Latin the punctum delens deleting point was sued to erase mistakes.

As the first Irish printing type was supplied by Elizabeth I to spread the Anglican faith, the Gaelic typeface was stated to be an Elizabethan invention and this is the argument levelled against it by Proinnsias Breathnach Uasal when he calls it a quaint Elizabethan type face. There is no evidence that it was used by the Elizabethans ever except for the printing of books in Irish. Several centuries earlier, however, the Old English or Anglo-Saxon language had been written in the variant of the Roman alphabet used in Lindisfarne which had been learnt in Iona and which is essentially the Irish alphabet used at the beginning of this century.

Dr Johnson in his dictionary called it the Anglo-Saxon alphabet, if I remembered correctly.