I thought I had done a post on some of the mysteries of the spelling system of Irish, but I can’t find it now. So I apologise if any of this is a repetition of stuff I have already talked about.
One of the things that strikes people about written Irish when they first see it is the multitude of vowel sequences which appear most of the time to represent simple vowel qualities. One can explain that many of these are because of the way Irish represents the difference between its “broad” and “slender” consonants. However, even this appears not to be the whole story at first sight.
As you can see from the picture, the Irish word for “office” is oifig. This is pronounced [ˈɪfɪɟ] or [ˈefɪɟ]. So what’s the “o” doing there at the beginning of the word? To give another example: the eolas (“knowledge”) is pronounced [ˈoləs]. As there are no consonants next to these apparently redundant vowel letters, the question arises as to what they are there for. However, they are actually not redundant.
When the definite article an appears before a masculine noun beginning with a vowel or s a t is prefixed to the noun. So for example “the knowledge” is an t-eolas and “the water” is an t-uisce. This t is slender (palatalised) in the first of these cases, even though the vowel pronounced in the word is a back vowel, and it is broad (non-palatalised) in the second case, though the vowel is a front vowel. So in effect the seemingly redundant vowels are indicating the slender/broad status of an empty onset and this status is made evident when the onset is filled by a prefixed consonant. Exactly the same thing happens with the simple past tense pre-verbal particle do, which turns up as d’ before a vowel sound. Thus, for example, d’uiscigh mé (“I watered/irrigated”) has a broad [d].
