Page:West Irish folk-tales and romances - William Larminie.djvu/269

 Rh

The most important features in the foregoing are,—(1) the use of j, which when initial has the German value, to mark slenderness, when attached to another consonant; (2) the use of c for broad g, dictated partly by the necessity of economising the resources of the Roman alphabet, and by the consideration that c, in most alphabets of uncertain value, and therefore sometimes entirely discarded by phoneticians, is thereby fixed and utilised; (3) the doubling of the vowels, a practice known in old Irish, to indicate length. The accents thus disappear, and, no dots to indicate aspiration being required, the diacritics, whose number is such a frequent source of error, are almost entirely got rid of, the only exception being ‿ the mark of obscurity, which may be usually omitted without