Restore Irish Language Lettering
Many Irish people, even those with an ongoing interest in their language, are unaware of what some have called the “Irish alphabet”, the Cló Gaelach. This was used to write the Irish language in various forms from before the early medieval period right up until the 1950s.
Although at first glance it may look like a unique alphabet, in fact it’s only a typeface or a font, like any one of dozens of different fonts we see every day. It uses fewer letters than the Latin alphabet and adds a few accents and dots over existing letters, but is otherwise a Latin type. It can be Googled as normal and typed on a modern keyboard, and is fairly legible even to people who have never studied it.
In and around the 1960s the Irish government, pressured by business, financial and foreign interests, started to phase out Cló Gaelach font types and replaced them with the Cló Rómhánach, which you’re reading right now.
This maneuver along with the “spelling reforms” introduced at the same time made it very difficult for parents and family to help young children learn Irish in school, since they were now being taught an unfamiliar language, introducing an intergenerational cultural rift which caused immense damage to the continuity of centuries of Irish language publications.
Thankfully we have an opportunity to heal that rift and return the use of the Cló Gaelach to Irish schools and universities, since modern technology has made it easy to use whatever font we prefer.
But what benefits would it bring?
There are many – the Irish language employs sounds which aren’t normally present in the English language, so spelling Irish words through English forces together strange letter combinations, mh, bfh, and so on. These sounds simply don’t have Latin letters to represent them, and letters which are used are often not pronounced at all.
There are more than sixty phonemes in the Irish language, it is phonetically one of the richest languages in Europe. Despite which, to accommodate this splendid variety of sound, the Irish traditionally employ an alphabet of only seventeen letters. The vowel sounds of the language are, for the most part, pure, and little of this can be properly represented with a Latin alphabet except through extensive linguistic mangling.
Reading and learning Irish through the Latin alphabet is simply much more difficult and non-intuitive. It’s far from simple a stylistic preference. For example Dubhthach can be far more easily written and read as Duḃṫaċ, or Lughbhaidh as Luġḃaiḋ.
Gaelchló fonts can be found here: https://www.gaelchlo.com/
We call on the Irish government to reinstate the teaching of the Cló Gaelach to Irish schools and universities as a matter of urgency, and to normalise its use throughout Irish society and culture.
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For me Gaeilge should retain its original form. And reinstate its use along with form including the punc.