Not sure if that subject really captures my question, but I was thinking about the relation between Irish and English, or rather the etymology of one compared to the other, as I am trying to get over all of the silent letters in Irish. I keep having difficulty with reading Irish words and pronouncing them when I don't quite remember the rules for which letter combinations are silent.

One day while I was in a pub, I saw a sign, or poster, with store fronts of Irish pubs and businesses, "Murphy's", "McCullough's", "McNaughton," where the words had either silent letters or perhaps a "ph" that sounded like an "f" or a "mh" that sounded like a "v." And it occurred to me that English can be really difficult to learn what with, "rough," "through," "though," and the like. Then it occurred to me that it's not just the different pronunciation of the seemingly same order of letters, but also the silent "gh" on ends. So then I figured that there would just be several Irish words that I'd have to commit the spelling and pronunciation to memory, and while I might not get it right the first time, someone might be kind enough to correct me, like when I spell "Go raigh maigh agat" like that.

Can any folks out there either confirm or deny my suspicions of either some Irish words being based on English words and/or vice versa?

Edit: that's supposed to "hysterically," not "hystically" :)

(Message edited by finbarr on March 16, 2007)

I don't know your background knowledge, so I might insult you, but I will proceed on my own term in the answer.

Hiberno English is an awful dog's dinner, as it includes anglicisations of names in forms that are not even the most prevalent (Murphy when O' M(w)urakoo is the better match as per Cork where most are from). English rules were used/misused to create meaningless terms, but remember that such names mirror English orthography, so to suggest that Irish and English are similar is a confound here.

However, it is true that often words are more historic in both languages, and that for some people is grounds for a respelling so that something liek the savage 'taw shay egg conch' would be permissable.

It overlooks some details: a) Irish has a very clear and 'phonetic' system of projection of orthography from the sounds. It worked in 1642, it worked in 1894, it works today as it is based on the dyad of broad and slender, a feature still current in the language. Thus, how to write a word from how it is spoken is easily achived. What confuses people is that the real language (i.e. the spoken one) moves on, so words like Ó Baoill have the high vowel of ao replaced with another high vowel of í, so that you could re-spell it as Ó Baíll.

In English, however, spellings taken from languages all over the place, and often from differing parts of England, and then you add in historic changes in English since Caxton. The result of this is often no clear rules to spelling. In Irish, however, even with out of date spelling, you can still use rules to generate the modern form (lenghten a vowel before an rr or dh), but in English it is more like Chinese with pictures, so random is the spelling at times.

Ph is usually f in several langues. What is difficult with that? There are not a lot of silent letters in Irish, but a lot of contingent digraphs that mess up English speakers. In the middle of a word, a broad bh is liable to diphthong -you just read it that way. To me, bh, mh etc are letters -I cannot see them as b followed by a h; of course I hard to learn to read in both languages at the same time (flash cards in Irish then in English, often just one after the other -the pain is coming back to me) [flashback]

This is interesting, I'd be interested in reading more. Either from you, BRN, or from a book, suggestions?

So is "bh" and "mh" one letter in Irish? I could see that, but certainly did not know that. For example, in Spanish, "ll" is one letter, as is "rr," but so is "l" and "r."

Where might I find clear rules to Irish spelling? That would be most helpful.

http://www.fiosfeasa.com/bearla/language/sounds.htm
http://www.nualeargais.ie/gnag/ortho.htm

(Message edited by méabh on March 17, 2007)

"bh" is an aspirated b. "mh" is an aspirated m. So in that sense, yes you can think of it as one letter. It can also be written as a b with a dot above it, or an m with a dot above it.

Thanks. So far, those webpages are very helpful.