Page:An Irish-English dictionary, being a thesaurus of words, phrases and idioms of the modern Irish language, with explanations in English.djvu/11

Rh The science of grammar becomes a mockery where there is not some show of uniformity in the written forms of the words, and students of the language are disheartened by an unsettled and ever varying orthography. The circumstance that the language has been growing apace, as all languages grow, for the last couple of hundred years, without in many parts of the country the check of a written or printed literature, has resulted in its forming itself into two or three more or less clearly defined dialects which differ from one another in several points. The Irish spoken in the Extreme North of Ireland differs from that spoken in Munster, and that spoken in Connaught differs from both. The Irish of South Connaught approaches that of Munster, while that of North Connaught resembles that of Ulster. As regards the orthography employed, perhaps the only item that will seem somewhat radical is the uniform use of, in preference to , respectively, but especially the use of for. On this point it may be observed that these sets of letter-combinations in general follow the same law, and that it is desirable to adopt a uniform system. In our books and dictionaries there is great confusion between the combinations and, and the time seemed to have come for writing uniformly one or the other. The question was, which should be selected. The selection of is only the natural lexicographical evolution. O'Naughton, the author of our earliest modern dictionary (finished 1727), writes for the most part, and devotes only a few pages to words beginning with. O'Brien (1767) states in his dictionary that and  are absolutely identical, and that words spelled with  will not be repeated under. O'Reilly made much