Page:Irish Made Easy - Shán Ó Cuív.pdf/18

 character of its orthography are all purely external. Arabic is still Arabic when transliterated into Roman letters, nor is Japanese any the more Japanese for being written in a mixture of disguised hieroglyphs and syllabic alphabetic writing, both borrowed from China. No existing system of writing is anything but an external disguise borrowed from some other language. Arabic is disguised Syriac writing, and the Russian alphabet is Byzantine Greek.”

With such authorities on their side it may be asked why the advocates of the Roman alphabet have not so far been successful. The reasons are many. In the first place there was naturally a strong sentiment in favour of preserving the letters which had been associated with the language for so many hundred years, and in the second place the inconvenience of using these letters was not so evident as it is now. Since Irish has begun to come out from the mountain and the bogs, and from the dusty manuscripts of the libraries and to force its way into the printing room, the counting house, and the bank, the enormous inconvenience of persevering with the old letters is forcing itself upon the attention of everybody. The newspapers, too, by giving us regularly Irish words and phrases in their ordinary type are familiarising us with the appearance of Irish words in the new dress, and are preparing for the change which, if the language is to survive, now seems inevitable.

One of the greatest forces working on the side of progress, however, is the interest