Page:Irish Made Easy - Shán Ó Cuív.pdf/26

, this system, which our forefathers called cäl le cäl agus leahan le lehan (slender with slender and broad with broad), is used only where the sound necessitates it, and not where the appearance of the written word requires it, as at present. There are no dead letters in our Irish, either consonant or vowel—every letter has some function to discharge. All aspirated letters, therefore, are dropped where they are silent.

With regard to the vowels, it will be seen that, in addition to the short vowels and the long vowels with which readers of Irish are familiar, three new sets of signs have been introduced. The grave accent (`) has been introduced to indicate short stressed vowels in those positions in which the spelling up to the present left the sound ambiguous or worse. The circumflex accent (ˆ) has been introduced to indicate nasality, which was ignored up to the present, to the detriment of the living speech, and the diaresis (¨) and the letter y have been introduced to enable sounds which in the present spelling require two, three, or four letters to be represented by one letter in the new. The use of these signs is illustrated in the table.

The sound which y represents (an í sound beginning and ending broad) is admirably illustrated by the phrase which National School teachers used to employ to teach their Irish-speaking pupils the meaning of the English word “sheep”—namely, “Sheep isea cyra agus cuínig er sin.” In this alphabet