quote:Has the Irish changed so much from medieval to modern that (were I to find a dictionary), I could not get the same sense of the meaning?
The short answer is "yes". There are lots of individual words that have not changed much, but overall things have changed enough that the average speaker of Modern Irish will be stumped by a text in Old Irish.
quote:Too, does Irish go into forms like other languages so I'd need to know endings?
Yes, very much so. And you also have to know how the beginnings of words change, too (unlike "normal" garden-variety European languages).
quote:And (just as an aside), my maiden name was King. Are you Irish?
American.