24 IRISH SPELLING 



not been sanctioned by literary usage. There was no 

 " historic " spelling. What were they to do ? To spell 

 as they pronounced would have been contrary to their 

 general methods, and indeed, owing to the vague way in 

 which many symbols had come to be used with no fixed 

 value, it would have been hard for them to express clearly 

 in writing exactly what they meant. The result was further 

 confusion. 



Let me give an example. The word for " swords " in 

 the classical language of the seventeenth century was 

 cioi-bifie, representing no doubt the Old Irish claidbiu, 

 accusative plural of claideb. What is the plural now ? 

 Well, in the dialect best known to me it rhymes with ctunce, 

 and is commonly spelled cUit>ifice. If people say that 

 a system is phonetic in which ui and Ait>rii may stand 

 for one and the same sound, they must attach a meaning 

 of their own to the word phonetic. But talking of 

 " historic " forms and the tradition of a thousand years, 

 would anyone knowing only ctAitttfice have guessed 

 claidbiu ? To be sure the t> and rh of ctAit>ttite are sup- 

 posed to be historic, because they show the connexion 

 between clAi-fctfice and the singular ciAi-Oe^rti (which 

 itself ought " historically " to be ciAi-be-aa), just as if 

 one should write fooeet in English instead of feet, to show 

 its connexion with the singular foot. 



Or take the modern word outtAifc. This is analysed 

 by the speakers of some dialects as -o'uOAifc. Consequently 

 by a very simple analogical process the negative becomes 

 nio|\ uttaifrc. But the modern classical form is ni outtAiftc. 

 Writers of certain dialects finding this too unfamiliar to 

 their own speech, and unwilling to give us what they really 

 say, have produced the mixed form nioft t>u&Aifc, which 

 is commonly written and printed to-day in Connacht Irish. 

 Whether the mixed form has any real existence I have no 

 means of judging. But for some districts at least it is 

 as unhistoric and as unphonetic as Keating's own form 

 would have been, had he chosen to write ni -06^11 OAifc 

 in order to show the connexion between his own ni 

 and the earlier ni erbart. 



