Irish Orthography - Diacritics

Diacritics

Irish spelling makes use today of only one diacritic, and formerly used a second. The acute accent (Irish: síneadh fada "long sign") is used to indicate a long vowel, as in bád /bˠaːd̪ˠ/ "boat". However, there are some circumstances under which a long vowel is not indicated by an acute accent, namely:

• before rd, rl, rn, rr, for example ard /aːɾˠd̪ˠ/ "high", eirleach /ˈeːɾˠlʲəx/ "destruction", dorn /d̪ˠoːɾˠn̪ˠ/ "fist"
• in the groups ae, ao, eo, for example aerach /ˈeːɾˠəx/ "gay", maol /mˠiːl̪ˠ/ "bare", ceol /coːl̪ˠ/ "music"
• in the groups omh(a) and umh(a), for example comharsa /ˈkoːɾˠsˠə/, Mumhain /mˠuːnʲ/ "Munster"
• long /iː/ and /uː/ before /aː/ or /oː/, e.g. fiáin /ˈfʲiːaːnʲ/ "wild", ruóg /ˈɾˠuːoːɡ/ "twine"

The overdot (Irish: ponc séimhithe "dot of lenition", buailte "struck", or simply séimhiú, "lenition") was formerly used, especially in Gaelic script, to indicate the lenited version of a consonant; currently a following letter h is used for this purpose. Thus the letters ḃ ċ ḋ ḟ ġ ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ are equivalent to bh ch dh fh gh mh ph st th. In Old Irish orthography, the dot was used only for ḟ ṡ, while the following h was used for ch ph th; lenition of other letters was not indicated. Later the two systems spread to the entire set of lenitable consonants and competed with each other. Eventually the standard practice was to use the dot when writing in Gaelic script and the following h when writing in Roman letters.

As with most European languages such as French, Spanish or German, Irish diacritics must be preserved in uppercase forms. If diacritics are unavailable (for example, on a computer using ASCII), there is no generally accepted standard for replacing it (unlike some languages like German, where the umlaut is replaced by a following "e" and ß is replaced by "ss"), and so it is generally just omitted entirely.

Lower-case "i" has no tittle in Gaelic script, and road signs in the Republic of Ireland, which use a typeface based on Transport, also use a dotless lowercase "i" (as well as a Latin alpha glyph for "a"). However, the tittle is generally included in printed material like books and newspapers and in electronic media like the Internet and CD-ROMs. Irish makes no graphemic distinction between dotted i and dotless ı (i.e. they are not different letters), as languages like Turkish and Azeri do.