Just as when I thought that learning the various sounds the consonants make, broad and slender, and the various sounds the vowels make, stressed, unstressed, long, short, and as vowel sequences, I found myself having problems especially when pronouncing words that have vowels flanking both sides, or just one side, of consonant digraphs like ‘mh’ and ‘dh’. What I realised is, when these are read as an entire block, as in Domhnach, the consonant digraphs could be rendered silent, or alter the vowel part to produce a diphthong or a long vowel. Thus today, in the final learning journey post on learning just how Irish writing and Irish sounds work, I will explore how some vowels just might interact with certain consonant digraphs, and how different their sounds may be. As usual, I will be focusing on the Ulster Irish variant.
I find myself encountering works containing these letter sequences in even the commonest of words, like ‘leabhair’ (books) and ‘margadh‘ (market), often relying on text-to-speech features on translation websites to work out how they are pronounced. But even those might not reflect the regional differences in spoken Irish, leading to further confusion for me.
These interactions with consonants cluster around the letters “bh”, “dh”, “gh”, and “mh”, and may have differences between stressed and unstressed syllables. But I cannot seem to find any pattern that indicates sequences that have different pronunciations for stressed and unstressed syllables, and which ones do not. Furthermore, some sequences produce a diphthong.
As I have done previously, I thought I would try to organise these into a table, in alphabetical order.
| Sequence | Stressed | Unstressed |
| abh, abha, abhai eabh, eabha, eabhai | /oː/ /əu/ | /oː/ /əu/ |
| adh, adha, adhai agh, agha, aghai eadh, eadha, eadhai eagh, eagha, eaghai | /eː/ /əi/ | /uː/ |
| aidh, aidhe aigh, aighe, aighea | /əi/ | /iː/ |
| amh, amha, amhai eamh, eamha, eamhai | /əu/ | /uː/ |
| eidh, eidhea, eidhi eigh, eighea, eighi | /eː/ | /eː/ |
| oidh, oidhea, oidhi oigh, oighea, oighi | /əi/ | /əi/ |
| obh, obha, obhai odh, odha, odhai ogh, ogha, oghai omh, omha, omhai eobh, eobha, eobhai eodh, eodha, eodhai eogh, eogha, eoghai eomh, eomha, eomhai | /oː/ | /oː/ |
| ubh umh, umha, umhai iubh iumh, iumha, iumhai | /uː/ | /uː/ |
After learning about these features, I sort of understand why Irish texts are read a bit like French; half the letters are just silent. With letter sequences as long as “eamhai” being read as just a diphthong, or “eomhai” read as a long vowel, one must surely wonder where half the letters went. I had the same question as well, and I am still trying to read up on this.
Like the other vowel sequences and consonants, there are exceptions here as well. These also pertain to certain verb endings and subject pronouns, in particular, the agreement with the first person singular pronoun “I”. For example, to say “I embrace”, it would be “glacaim“.
Here, the “-aim” suffix is pronounced /əmˠ/. This also applies for the suffix “-im”. The other suffixes affected by this exception are “-aigh” and “-igh”, like in “chuimhnigh mé” (I remembered). Here, these suffixes are pronounced as /ə/. It seems to me that since these are usually verb conjugations, and stress usually falls on the first syllable, it would be intuitive to think that these suffixes affected by this exception fall on unstressed syllables, which reduce to a schwa.
To cap it all off, Irish seems to have a system of epenthesis. This is a phonetic feature where a sound is inserted within a word. In Irish, this is shown as an unstressed schwa inserted between certain consonants, making one word seeming to have fewer syllables than its pronunciation. Remember the word “margadh“? Here, epenthesis will occur between the “r” and the “g”, leading to it having three syllables (mar + ə + gadh) instead of the apparent two.
However, exceptions do apply, as epenthesis does not occur after long vowels, or compound words that are just conjoined together like ‘garmhac‘ (as ‘gar’ + ‘mhac‘, grandson). This lack of epenthesis sort of marks where one constituent word ends and another begins, something referred to as a morpheme boundary by linguists.
Even though Irish spelling seems really complicated from a first impression, even after fully immersing myself in linking letters to sounds, I am still quite sure that I will trip up in pronunciation somewhere along the way. This could occur in situations like singing Irish-language songs, or just trying to narrate a piece of Irish text. So it definitely came as a surprise to me to learn that this orthography in use today is actually a simplified version of Irish writing, relative to the time before An Caighdeán Oifigiúil was established in the 1950s. One example is the word bá, which is simplified from older spellings ‘bádh‘ (bay), ‘báidh‘ (sympathy), and ‘bádhadh‘ (drowning).
Another language written in a similar fashion is Scottish Gaelic, which is a separate language from Irish Gaelic. With similar letters and diacritic marks used, there is perhaps some similarities in how the letters are pronounced, although from my recollection, Scottish Gaelic tends to preserve more older forms of spelling compared to its Irish counterparts. ‘Bá’ in Irish could still mean ‘bàgh‘, ‘bàidh‘, or ‘bàthadh‘ in Scottish Gaelic. So this could be another avenue for me to look into, and discover what the differences are between Scottish Gaelic and Irish writing.
There is still much more to explore in the world of written Irish, so perhaps as I work on Irish, I would grow to understand the official standard for Irish grammar and writing, the An Caighdeán Oifigiúil. There is a publication dated to 2017 on the website for the Tithe an Oireachtas, entirely in Irish which covers the grammar bits, which I will link here:
Afterword
My trip to Ennis in 2019, although not quite a Gaeilge-speaking region of Ireland, still exposed me first-hand to written Gaeilge which I found fascinating. I wanted to write about Gaeilge for years, but never really understood how writing and reading it worked. One of my most favourite books on Irish was Darach ó Séaghdha’s Motherfoclóir, which had an entertaining, engaging spin on interesting Irish words, the author’s experiences, and bits about the language, like the importance of the fada. It is a great primer to the Irish language, and to the casual language learner, it is a great book I would recommend.
The Language Closet 