Blair Collection > Gaelic journal > Volume 1, number 1

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THE GAELIC JOURNAL.
considereil ihe feelings and opinions of ignorant Saxons
or ignorant Irishmen, we should have very little respect
for anything really national.
I admit, however, that the points — which in later times
came to be the recognised marks of aspiration —are in
some ways more convenient than the /i's — they are easier to
put in. .ind they shorten the words considerably. But they
have some disadvantages. In the first place, it is very
easy to forget and omit them, both in writing and printing.
Every one familiar with our old writings must have oli-
served how often these points were omitted, and how
difficult it often is on that account to determine the true
pronunciation of words, or to arrive at correct vuks for
aspiration. I do not here mean the writings of the earlier
centuries — say from the sixth to the tenth — when many of
tlie consonants now aspirated were — as I hold — still pro-
nounced pure. I refer more particularly to the writings
of the si.\teenth and seventeenth centuries, in which —
even allowing for much that may not as yet be very well
understood — great carelessness and irregularity in this re-
spect are observable. But/<;/«/i are easily omitted even
by the most careful writers. In the second place, if we
are to consider foreigners, I think ch, g/i, ph, and bh are
more generally intelligible than c, g, p, b— though I ad-
mit that the other aspirated consonants m Irish are not so
simple or so regular in their sounds. But in truth, even
if there were no wrong or unnecessary aspirations in Irish,
and even if the diflerence between Irish and English as to
the frequency of the aspirate were much greater than I be-
lieve it re.illy is, it is not the h or the point (•) that is to
be blamed at all in this matter, but the genius of our lan-
guage — or rather our system of orthography. To any one
curious about our language, half-an-lii "in' ir, :; ;i"'ion
or half an hour's study will furnish li;i;i v M 1 . ; h,
the whole of this part of Irish ]in.iiiii. ,. I in,
thirdly, there is the serious objection il i • ;.-ii)i,
are used in the Roman letter thuTL- aii-r, the n.v.' -iiv l-r
new type. This is the only, or at any ratr. the chiri ob-
jection there can be to what I iiui-l call — with all rc^jiect
to Cljtm Concob^ii\ — the praiseworthy and excellent at-
tempt made first by Father Furlong in his Prayer Book ;
next by Mr. MacPhilpin in the tuam Nnvs; and lately
also by Canon Bourke in some of his works, to popularise
dotted Roman type. If there were any material difierence
between the expensiveness of full Irish type and dotted
Roman, I think much could be said lor the latter.
I have not done yet with Cbann Concoboiip. The mo-
dern Scottish Gael were not the first to use the /; to ex-
press aspiration. It is the faints that are modern — as
used for this purpose at any rate. In the oldest Irish
MSS.— written in what your respected correspondent can-
not blame me for calling old Roman — points were used
only over the j and the /—as often to express the sup-
pression or " eclipsis " of the \ (as in c-f-iiil) as to denote
its aspiration (as in ŵ full), and always to denote the sup-
piesssion of the sound of the p (as in intj pip, now An pip),
though in modern times this sinking of the sound of p has
been strangely referred to the general principle of aspira-
tion. In old Irish, the only consonants .aspirated were
the three tennes c, p, c, and sometimes p and p. But the
aspirate sounds of c p, c were in the earliest times repre-
sented not by points over the letters, but generally by
writing the h after these letters — as some of us venture to
do now in modtrn Roman. For this I need only refer to
any of the more ancient MSS., or to O'Curry's fac-
similes — as also to O'Donovan's Grammar, pp. 41, 42,
and 43. The last-mentioned author on p. 43 of his Irish
Grammar gives — in illustration of this very point, some
monumental inscriptions from the earliest tomb-stones at
Clonmacnoise, among them the following :— Opoic tio
ChuichoilC'A prayer for Tuathal"): opoic apChuuiTibepp
("Aprayerfor Cuindless"): opoicTJO niielphicpaic (-'A
prayer for Mael Phatraic "). Are the h's " barbarous " in
these words? Sometimes, also, but less frequently a mark
(something like 1-) which was really nothing less than half
of the H was placed over c,p,c, to express the same thing *
In later ages when the vtedials b, t), 5 also came to be
aspirated, our ancestors clearly saw it was but an extension
of the principle recognised in the case of the tenues, and
logically and consistently they expressed the aspiration in
the same way — by the h. So bh and T>h and jh, and also
mil became familiar. Later still there arose some confusion
of the different marks, until at last the/i'/K/which was at first
only used for one or two letters, came to be considered a
convenient substitute for the h, and was adopted as the
most general sign of aspiration. But to the latest times
the h continued to be occasionally used, especially for
initial aspirates. Nor must it be forgotten, that in at least
one standard modern Irish work — Hardiman's Minstrelsy
already mentioned — throughout the two volumes the h is
used to the entire exclusion of the point— though the type
is most certainly Irish, and perhaps the first really beau-
tiful Irish type ever cut. But I suppose clûnn Concobiiiv
considers this also was a "fad" or " crotchet."
The thing to find most fault with is, not that the Irish
consistently used //s. or changed them for points to ex-
press aspiration, but that letters which, in course of ages
became silent, should have been still unnecessarily re-
tained, when most other modern languages — in which as-
pi lation of the consonants has been e(|ually at work — have
either changed those aspirated consonants to single letters,
or have sunk them altogether in writing — as we see, has
been the case with Italian, French, Spanish, and also in
English and in Welsh. Some may think that the reten-
tion of this traditional spelling points to a conservative in-
stinct in the Celtic nature ; but this can hardly be so,
when we consider the simplification that has taken place
in the writing of Welsh and Breton. Within the last 100
years a great simplification has occurred in the orthogra-
phy of most of the modern languages of Europe. It is
only indeed within this period that most of these languages
have arrived at a definite and regular orthography — if it
can be truly said that any living language ever att.ains an
absolutely fixed and regular standard of writing. I cannot
but think, too, if our language had been much written a
hundred years ago — if it had been studied as widely and
as keenly then as it is now, we should have had at this
day an orthography much more rational, more regular,
and more fixed. If I should hint that a simpler and more
rational mode of writing Irish — in the one sort of charac-
ter as in the other — is not only possible, but extremely de-
sirable. I daresay I should be considered terribly unortho-
dox ; especially by those who forget that the ancient
fadesiii (self) has melted down to "fein," (which indeed
was often written "fen" by O'CIery and MacFirbis);
that btidesta (henceforth) has'becnme " feasia ;" that hhoes
(yet) has been made " f(is;" tliat /.?;;/..■// (to get) has be-
come " fághail," which is i.r.nMuiued " f.iil ;" that lathe (a
day), has become "la;" that trcJaiiis (abstinence—but ori-
ginally meaning a three days' fast), has been made
"treanas;" that Cadhri^/ieas [LtViX — e.i. Quadrages-ima)
has been softened down to " Caraos," just as the same
Latin word has become " Garawys " in Welsh, and
"Carême" in French ; in all which cases, and numbers
of others that might be given, we have obvious and well-
known instances of the shortening and simplifying pro-
cess. This, however, is another and a wider question
* Scholars tell us that this also was the origin of the
Greek stiritus asỳer.