I'm doing some lettering in seancló and so I'm replacing the 'h' with a point - but I notice that several of you are using seancló in various sentences and proverbs at the end of your posts and you include 'h'. Is this normal or is it a mistake? The other question I have is this - in the old texts and manuscripts did they still use the 'h' ? for example in - le hór.

maybe because some fonts don't allow to make the dots easily (if the allow to do dots at all!)



h's were pronounced but not always written as prefixed to vowels. And sometimes, scribes would write h's while no h was meant to be pronounced. For instance, the preposition "i" was often spelt "hi" in Old Irish, but no h were pronounced there. Writing h's and pronouncing h's were almost two independent things: you could have written h's that weren't pronounced and pronounced h's that weren't written. Old Irish spelling was very fluctuating on things like that, it wasn't as logical as Modern Irish, the texts were written by native speakers for native speakers, who would understand the words even if they were spelt in different manners all the time, and when reading they'd do the proper mutations even though these weren't written

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In college I was shown some texts in Old Irish which included a small h placed over the consonant where you would normally see a dot. I think this was over the letters T and S (but not over others).

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The same happens today, for example when native speakers see words like:

Gaeilge/ inniu/ dearmad

Munster Irish speakers pronounce them as:

Gaeluinn/ inniuimh/ dearúd

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it's not the same thing, in your examples, what is written is standard Irish, and what Munster speakers say is different, they say "inniubh" and "dearmhad". These aren't other ways to pronounce "inniu" and "dearmad", they are variants, I mean, they have the same origins but aren't simply differences of pronunciation (-ma- is never pronounced -ú-, so there's something more there)

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Yes they have the same origins, and they mightn't be different pronouciation variants historically of the same word but in a modern context you may argue otherwise. A younger Gaeltacht person may never ever have seen the traditional spelling of dearmhad or inniuimh or Gaolainn but will apply those pronounciations to their standardised spellings. So, if you ask a Munster Gaeltacht child to write Gaoluinn or Dearmhad or inniumh they may instead spell them as Gaeilge or Dearmad or inniu. So, in their mind when they say dearmhad and they see dearmad in writing srl...

And anyway if they did have knowledge of how they were spelled historically its still the same thing as they have taken the subconscious decision to pronounce them as Gaoluinn/ dearmhad/ inniumh even though they see Gaeilge/ dearmad/ inniu, because they know that's the way it should be pronounced in their dialect.

That's the same as an Old Irish speaker reading "na Érenn" but knowing they should pronounce it as "na hÉrenn" or seeing the article "in" modern (an) as "hin" but not pronouncing the séimhiú.

Its the same thing in English where someone makes a spelling mistake but we pronounce the word as if it were spelled right and sometimes we might even skip the mistake entirely because or brain is so focused in on what should be written.

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No it's not the same thing.
An Old Irish speaker, when he saw "inna Érenn", would always pronounce "inna h-Érenn", because otherwise it's wrong. He pronounces something that isn't written, but that is mandatory.
Concerning dearmad, a Munster speaker would pronounce "dearúd" if he has learnt that what is spelt "dearmad" in Standard Irish corresponds to what he says "dearúd" in his dialect. But there's no mandatory grammar rule there, and if the Munster speakers hasn't learnt standard Irish, he can't know. While an Old Irish speaker, since he knows how to speak, will always read "inna h-Érenn" because it can't be otherwise.



there's no séimhiú here. There's only an h prefixed to a vowel (and it's a graphic h, not a grammatical one). Séimhiú = putting an h after a consonant to indicate it's pronounced differently. Vowels can't be lenited...

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ok, I get you , but it is the same thing as reading a mistake in English or Irish but subconsciously fixing the mistake in your head without noticing your doing so, right?



I am not up to date with grammatical terminology because I have learned Irish and English naturally. Most of the terminology that I have picked up I have done so here. I tend to call all "h"s in Irish séimhiús because they have the habit of mellowing letters with its distinctive séimhiú or "h" sound whether they be consonants or vowels. That's what séimhiú in Irish means "a mellower". Are you correcting me for my lack of understanding of what a séimhiú is (if so what is a h called when its prefixed to vowels, so I don't make the same mistake again ) or the fact that there is no record of the article being spelled "hin"?

What's the difference between a graphic "h" and a grammatical one?

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ok, but as I explained in another thread, in Irish you don't lenite (séimhiú-ize) consonants in the same contexts as when you prefix h- to vowels. So if you use the word "séimhiú" anytime an h appears, it's impossible to know what you're talking about:

a chat (his cat) & a úll (his apple). Séimhiú (on cat)
a cat (her cat) & a húll (her apple). Séimhiú (on úll).
So you'd say "the possessive "a", masculine and feminine, triggers séimhiú". And the people who'll read that will think: so "a chat" means both his and her cat, and "a húll" means both his and her apple?

Many teachers say like you, they use "séimhiú" to talk about prefixing h and about putting h after a consonant, and that's why so many learners mix up everything
The way it's explained in grammars is much clearer and prevents learners from mixing all that up:

séimhiú = putting an h after the first consonant.
prefixing h to vowels = prefixing h to vowels
urú = putting one (or 2 in the case of f>bhf) consonant just before the first letter.

Like that, it's clear that there are 3 different phenomena, and that they happen in different contexts.



now we're talking about Old Irish, right Graphic h's don't exist in Modern Irish.
A graphic h is that h Old Irish scribes would put at random at the beginning of almost any word that normally begins with a vowel. Most of the time it's not pronounced, it's just to decorate or I don't know what There's no linguistic reason for it to be there anyway

A grammatical h is that prefixed h I talked about, the one that is pronounced in certain contexts, for instance "a hech" (Old Irish, her horse). It's a grammatical h because it appears here because of a grammatical rule: feminine possessive "a" prefixes h to vowels.

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Many teachers - really? I don't think I've come across one, ever. That's like telling me that there are English teachers out there who don't know the difference between vowels and consonants. Okay, some primary school teachers don't have much Irish at all, so maybe...