THE ROMAN ALPHABET 13 



These little books, however, though interesting and 

 often important monuments of dialectic usage, are really 

 examples of a method which is not ours. They are speci- 

 mens of what we are not doing. What then are we doing, 

 or trying to do ? We are trying to simplify the existing 

 orthography. And to do that we want to encourage the 

 use of the international form of the Roman alphabet, with 

 Irish sounds apportioned to the letters. Dead letters we 

 propose simply to drop. 



The idea of using the ordinary modern form of the 

 Roman alphabet for writing Irish stirs up a surprising 

 amount of heat in many quarters. It is supposed to be 

 a kind of treachery to the national sentiment, for of course 

 the Roman alphabet is an English invention, and belongs 

 properly to the English language ! As an excellent Irish 

 speaker said to me once with a shake of the head, " 'Tis 

 very hard to bring the Irish sounds out of English letters/' 

 The obvious retort was that Irish sounds must be brought 

 out of Irish lips. We may be sure that the authors of 

 the numerous Irish catechisms to which I have referred 

 had no fear of the result. 



Letters, as I have said, are merely conventional signs. 

 The word cu does not become an English word if we write 

 it tu. We might use the Greek alphabet or one of the 

 Sanskrit alphabets without altering the language. We 

 might even, strange to say, express our words by some 

 completely new system of strokes and dashes and curves, 

 some form of shorthand. And shorthand would no more 

 alter or damage the language of Ireland than it has altered 

 or damaged that of any country in the world. 



The Roman alphabet is not an ideal one. It is not 

 particularly well suited to represent the numerous fine 

 shades of sound which are such a marked feature of the 

 Irish language. But it is in possession. It is known all 

 over the world. Those who use it have at their disposal 

 the experience derived from centuries of penmanship and 

 type-founding, with endless experiments in the direction 

 of clearness and variety of shapes and sizes. Yet many 

 of you protest that modern Irish must be excluded from 



