What Does the Irish Alphabet Look Like Like?

Irish (or Irish-Gaelic) is written with the Roman alphabet, the same alphabet we use in English. Oddly, it manages with just 18 letters (plus eight more for unusual or foreign words). These letters are: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U. Irish also uses one important diacritical mark, called the fada (more technically, the síneadh fada). The fada looks like the French "accent aigu," and makes a vowel long (the word fada means "long"). Short vowels and long vowels in Irish sound different and make a difference in meaning.

Here are the vowels with fada marks over them: á, é, í, ó, ú. I have trouble typing these directly into my blog and find that I have to type them into a MS Word file and then cut and paste them into my blog. The procedure I use in MS Word is that I hold down the Ctrl key while typing the apostrophe, then I type the vowel, and voila, the vowel appears with the fada over it. I don't know if all word processors work this way (probably not). If I find another or more efficient way of doing this, I will post it in this blog.

Irish used to have one other diacritic, a dot put over certain letters (principally consonants) in certain circumstances (you will pull your hair out, if you have any, when I explain this to you at some later time). In recent decades this point or dot has been replaced by the letter "h" after the consonant. This process "lenites" or mutates the sound of that consonant. Much more on that later.

Check out this Wikipedia entry for more on Irish spelling and writing, including examples of the older Gaelic fonts (still seen from time to time): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography