When regular is not easy: Cracking the code of Irish orthography

ABSTRACT

Irish is well-known to be a threatened minority language, which has a number of under-researched features. This article presents an analysis of Irish orthography, based on the most frequent words in a corpus of children’s literature in Irish. We identify both basic orthographic rules and a few phonological rules that systematically alter pronunciations from those expected based on the orthographic norms. While comparison of Irish spelling patterns with those in a similar corpus for English confirms a widespread belief that the orthography of Irish is more regular than that of English (the L1 of most beginning readers of Irish), this analysis refutes the commonly accepted corollary assumption that explicit decoding instruction in Irish is unnecessary for learners already literate in English, based on further examination of other features differentiating the two languages. We argue that, despite its greater regularity, Irish spelling is sufficiently complex and distinct from English to challenge learners and require explicit instruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Irish
• Reading
• Orthography
• Regularity
• Decoding

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented to the annual meeting of the North American Association for Celtic Language Teachers in Waterford, Ireland, June 2014. We are grateful to participants at that conference for feedback and discussion, and to two anonymous referees for their suggestions for improving the paper. We also thank the many teachers, language scholars and native speaker consultants who contributed to this and earlier studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹This transparency reference was not included in the published version of Lyddy’s (2005) article, and subsequent work (e.g., Parsons and Lyddy, 2009a, 2009b) has shifted to describing the system as ‘not transparent’. Nevertheless, the view espoused in Ó hAiniféin’s (2008) online lecture has been highly influential with teachers, as was borne out in interviews with teachers.

²These interviews include a number of statements like the following, from teachers, teacher educators and curriculum developers alike: “There are no unpronounced letters in Irish for the most part”, “I think that in a way a lot of Irish is simpler [than English]”, “Irish is actually so much easier than English because a sound is a sound; it doesn’t change’. Difficult as such perceptions may be to justify on serious consideration of the orthographic system, the perceptions nonetheless exist, and must be taken into account in assessing the teaching implications of Irish spelling.

³Print sources consulted include de Bhaldraithe (1953, 1975) and Wigger (2004) for Connacht; Ó Cuív (1944/1988), Ó Sé (2000), Sjoestedt-Jonval (1931) and Breathnach (1947) for Munster; Wagner (1979), Quiggan (1906) and Sommerfelt (1922) for Ulster.

⁴Lexical items showing consistent deviation from the pronunciation indicated by spellings, however, are identified as irregular.

⁵Sometimes the difference is one of primary point of articulation, as in the articulation of 〈s〉 as broad [s] but slender [ʃ]. Further phonetic details of Irish phonemes can be found in the various linguistic studies of Irish cited above.

⁶In some dialects, there is also a tenseness contrast in the laterals.

⁷Variation in the data and published monographs suggest that the system is still in the process of realignment. For simplicity, this analysis treats all sonorants as regular regardless of tenseness, provided pronunciation matches spelling with respect to point and manner of articulation. In this we follow the Lárchanúint treatment of double consonants as identical to single ones, which is the usual Munster system. English speakers are used to double and single consonants with the same values, and given the variation, the phonetic details are not likely to be mastered before a fairly advanced level of exposure to a particular dialect's patterns of usage, a level well beyond that of primary school learners which is our focus here.

⁸Henceforth the term ‘digraph’ will be used as a cover term to include trigraphs and any more complex graphemes.

⁹Because Stuart et al. (2003) identify regularity only for the first 100 words, this comparison is necessarily approximate. In determining regularity of the remaining words, we first followed the model of those 100, and where later words contained spellings not found in the first 100, we considered a spelling to be regular only where it was pronounced consistently in all or the vast majority of words where it occurred, e.g., 〈ee〉 as /iː/, 〈oa〉 as /oː/, 〈ai〉 as /eː/, 〈igh〉 as /ai/.

¹⁰One word where raising is not found is 〈leon〉 ‘lion’. There are other dialect-specific lexical exceptions: e.g., 〈i gcónaí〉 ‘always’ exhibits raising only in Connacht.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IIF) [grant number 302123] from the European Union.