Page:Irish Made Easy - Shán Ó Cuív.pdf/17

 letters published in the “Freeman's Journal,” in 1893, repeated to the Gaelic League the appeal which Canon Burke made in 1877 to the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. He went further, and suggested that the language should be written phonetically.

Professor Sweet, of Oxford, the great English authority on phonetics, who lectured in Dublin two or three years ago for the School of Irish Learning, in his work on “The Practical Study of Languages,” refers to the increasing use of the Roman letters. Here is what he says:

"Fortunately there is a growing tendency to substitute the Roman for the National alphabet in many languages. Holland, Sweden, England, and many other countries have given up the black letter, and others are following in their steps. The practice of transliteration into the Roman alphabet has extended to many of the Slavonic languages. . . . . . The first thing is to learn the language itself in the easiest possible way, which involves beginning with transliterated texts. When the language itself has once been learnt, it can be easily read in any, alphabet. Greek is still Greek in a Roman as well as in a Byzantine dress, Arabic is still Arabic, even when written with Hebrew letters, just as English remains English in all the hundreds of systems of shorthand in which it has from time to time been written. “The difficulties caused by the written form of the language, such as the complexity of its alphabet–which again may be the result of the writing being partly hieroglyphic–the ambiguity or unphonetic