The “monks” didn’t just make some arbitrary, irrational decision. The Irish spelling rules go hand-in-hand with the way the Irish language works.
In Irish, pronunciation of a particular phoneme changes depending on things that are happening around it, like vowels, grammar, and other stuff.
For example when you address someone—say, Seán or Máire—directly (vocative case), the pronunciations change. This rule existed before Irish was written down.
So the writing rules accommodated this by saying that to indicate the change, insert an H—“a Sheán” and “a Mháire.” If you were to write it as “a Heán” and “a Wáire,” which would be easier for English speakers, you make it harder to understand how Irish itself works.
To be more specific, consonants in Irish come in pairs, like in Russian—palatalized (Y-colored or “slender”) and velarized (W-colored or “broad”). This is a distinction that’s difficult to explain to an English speaker so I won’t go into detail.
So, for example, there’s a broad and slender ** sound. Vowels are also considered broad (a, o, u) or slender (e, i). So “b” adjacent to “e” or “i” is slender but adjacent to the others are broad. To “force” the consonant to switch, you insert a silent vowel of the other type—“bi” is slender but “bui” is broad with a silent “u.”
Furthermore, depending on grammar and syntax, a consonant may be lenited (aka softened, weakened, or aspirated) or eclipsed (aka nasalized). Lenition is indicated by inserting an “h” after the consonant (as explained above for the vocative case)—ph, bh, th, dh, ch, gh, fh, sh, mh.
Eclipsis is indicated by inserting a different letter before the consonant—p->bp, b->mb, t->dt, d->nd, c->gc, g->ng, f->bhf, s->ts. In eclipsis, the new letter is pronounced and the old goes silent.
There’s a series of short stories by Sterling Lanier about one Brigadier Ffellowes, whose tales of strange adventures around the world rivet the audience at his club. They’re good and some are pretty hair-raising.
SPOILER ALERT:
There’s one, however, which turns on his misunderstanding of the spoken word Samhain as “Sam Haynes,” which…doesn’t work.
An “M” surrounded by "A"s is velarized—the trailing A in this case is silent, so think of it as “samhin”
The “M” in this word is lenited.
Lenition is indicated by a trailing “H”.
A lenited velar “M”, spelled “MH”, sounds somewhat like English “W”
Result—“sawin”
Easy.
To explain it the other way around would require a much deeper understanding of the history, etymology, structure, grammar, and syntax than I know or would be appropriate for a single discussion thread.
Suffice to say, if you get into learning Irish at all, it makes sense.
Irish chose to indicate palatalization/velarization, lenition, and eclipsis by inserting letters. It could have done so by using diacritical marks, but that wouldn’t be any clearer to English speakers. It would be like Vietnamese or Greek, with clouds of gnats buzzing around every word. An English speaker would still have to learn the pronunciation. It wouldn’t be evident.
Is this the same sound as in Scots Gaelic? My understanding is that “mh” is the same as “bh” and when pronounced as a “v” sound, it is not the dental-labial version that we are familiar with in English but a fully labial version (buzzing of pursed lips).
I can throw another bad pronunciation wrench in here. Many years ago, when I was in the SCA, the annual event was usually pronounced ‘sah-ween.’
Not sure if that’s common among American medievalists or if it was just around the Kingdom of An Tir. Guess it was an unconscious attempt to blend the Irish word with ‘Halloween.’
Thinking about it some more, I can see that a broad [mh] or [bh] would be closer to /beta/ and a slender one closer to /v/ due to lip rounding/tensing respectively.
Irish was a written language before English was, so you have your question the wrong way round. Why, when the English decided to start writing things down, did they not use the simple and regular orthography already developed in Ireland, but instead come up with their own bizarre and inconsistent rules?
Sorry but even if Welsh didn’t happen to be older than English that’s impossible. Whenever English acquires a word from another language, you guys try to keep both the original spelling (which may need to get reduced to the English alphabet, or may get transcribed to English following either a specific transcription system or the writer’s gut feeling, or may have passed through another Latin-alphabet language’s transcription, or two of the above) and the original pronunciation; the pronunciation then gets changed both because of different phonetic maps and because of hypercorrectors (people thinking that a word is Greek when it’s Latin and stuff like that); the spelling may end up being changed due to hypercorrections, to simplification attempts, homophony (which oh joy only applies in some dialects) or just bad spelling…
Before you apply a transcription system you need to have one. English doesn’t so much have a transcription system as a transcription 5D maze.
I seem to recall from S. M. Stirling’s “Emberverse” series, before I gave up on it (many Samhain-observing pagan characters in the books), that there, the pronunciation was rendered for the benefit of the unfamiliar, as “Sow [to rhyme with ‘plough’]-een” – quite similar to the above “sah-ween”. A number of the characters in the books, are former SCA types – maybe influencing the pronunciation given there.
(The phonetics / spelling material in this thread is most impressive, but causing me an acute case of “my brain hurts” :dubious: …)
Gaelic orthography is about as old as English orthography (7th-8th century), and has an equally valid interpretation of the Latin script as English does. It is also quite arguably less bizarre once you learn the rules.
Irish, English, and French are all bizarrely difficult for the same reason: spelling consolidation happened 500-800 years ago.
So if I’m understanding correctly, we get Samhain, because that’s how Irish gaelic is written in the Latin alphabet, not how it would have been translated into English?
In other words, had Irish been originally written in some other script, and then translated into Latin, it probably would have been more phonetic in English (like say… transliterating Cyrillic or Greek?)
