Except I didn’t exist 24 years back! I was born ten years later after this thread was created and didn’t have much interest in languages until now, so go easy on me, please!
Some of the people you’re responding to don’t exist now.
You make a point! Again! Please forgive me and go easy on me!
No mercy! Release the Space Herpes!
Shit shit! Please don’t!
Replying so I remember this thread tomorrow — there’s a perfectly good answer to the question, which I can explain better when I’m at a full keyboard. Spoiler:
- Irish has way more sounds than Latin
- sounds change over time
- they learned to write from the Romano-British after some sound changes had happened in Brythonic
- consonant mutations
(if anyone is still interested after all this time)
Here are my responses to your points:
- Even if there are many sounds, that’s in many languages too. Many languages have a ly more
- Consonants mutations are in Finnish too
Are you claiming Irish spelling is “unusual”?
However (perhaps @Dr.Drake would care to comment on this) is is indisputable that Irish was subject to some spelling reform in the 20th century, which may have been a well-intentioned attempt to “simplify” the orthography or some political ploy, but IMO artificial spelling reforms are a hot mess, especially when there was already standard Gaelic literature.
Re. consonant mutation, some languages do not bother to indicate them orthographically at all; Irish spelling seems helpful in this regard.
An acquaintance once told me that the spelling of an Irish word tells you how it was pronounced in the Middle Ages, how the pronunciation shifted in the Renaissance, and how the pronunciation shifted again in the modern era. Great for people who want to study the language, but a little rough on people trying to learn it.
As for the Kelt/Selt divide, the problem is that, while the Celts had words for hundreds of individual tribes, the had no word for the generic concept of “Celt”. The Greeks labelled them “Keltoi”, spelled with a kappa. The Romans spelled it with a “C”. In later centuries, Latin-speakers started pronouncing the “C” like an “S”. So, to be utterly pedantic, both pronunciations have been acceptable for many centuries.
These explanations make much more sense than the unusual pronunciations being the result of the spelling.
There are languages where the spelling is almost 100% predictable from the pronunciation, and vice versa. There is a mapping between sound and symbol. Finnish would be one example, and Spanish comes close (you can’t predict from the pronunciation whether the word is written with “b” or “v”, and some dialects have “ll” = “y”).
There are languages where you cannot predict the spelling from the sound, but you CAN predict the sound from the spelling with high accuracy. You may be surprised to learn that both Irish and French fall into this category. There are a few exceptional cases in French, mainly involving silent final letters (there are two words spelled “as” with different pronunciations, similarly for “fils”), but in both languages you can predict with >99% confidence the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling.
Finally there is English where the orthography encodes the phonology much more loosely, meaning there is a degree of guesswork involved both in pronouncing an unfamiliar written word, and in spelling an unfamiliar word that you are hearing for the first time.
I think the answer is that Irish spelling is based on Latin letters (as opposed to Greek or whatever), [cf. also Ogham], but as for “unusual pronunciations”, even Latin was no longer pronounced exactly the same as Classical Latin. Also, you cannot expect Old Irish spelling to be an exact phonetic, or even entirely intuitive, transcription of modern Irish dialect, of which there is more than one in any case. ETA but as @hibernicus points out, given the written word one should be able to pronounce it.
Okay, the longish answer:
Irish has a very large sound inventory. Like Russian, there are palatalized and non-palatalized consonants. Unlike Russian or Latin, there are also many vowels. The Latin alphabet needs modification if it’s going to work.
The Irish learned to write from the Romano-British, by which point two things had happened:
- In Latin, the letter H was no longer pronounced (except in PH from Greek words, etc.), leaving it a null character available for combination.
- In Brythonic, intervocalic unvoiced consonants became voiced, which meant that the word historically pronounced “pop” was now pronounced “pob” but still spelled “pop,” meaning that most consonants had two potential pronunciations, based on position in the word.
Middle Irish solved #2 with #1: the sound /v/ could be written with the Latin punctum delens as ḃ. There is an alternate convention, to write bh, which is much more common in Modern Irish.
There’s another feature of the Celtic languages—basically the same as #2—where a word starting with P will sometimes be pronounced as starting with B or PH, depending on the grammatical situation and / or the word preceeding it. So the relationship of P–B–PH is obvious in Irish. (and B from P is spelled BP now, similar to the logic in English “Boat”—boat is pronounced bōt but in Old English as bāt, so we still write the A but put the letter we actually pronounce in front of it.
Problem #3: In the Middle Irish period, more sounds fell together. DH & GH; BH & MH; SH & TH. PH-from-P and F-from-F were already homonyms. FH-from-F was already silent. Sometimes DH, GH, BH, and MH were also silent at the end of words or in long clusters (this is what the Irish Spelling Reform mentioned upthread was meant to solve: not the strange orthography, but the equivalent of changing English “through” to “thru” and “night” to “nite”).
Problem #4: In Old Irish, the palatal consonants only happened before E and I. By Middle Irish, the vowels had shifted, and you had pairs like English poo / pew. So they developed a convention of keeping the E or I to indicate palatal consonants, or A O U to indicate non-palatal, leaving words like ceann, “head,” where “ce” is how you spell that kind of K before an A, and “ann” is the vowel. The double-N is also meaningful but I’ll ignore it for now.
Anyway, the gist of it is you wind up with a system where you have:
B +A/O/U vs B + E / I vs BH + A/O/U vs BH + E/I
for the four different values of “b,” repeated for each mutable consonant (which is most of them), and a lot of vowels because some are vowels and some are indicators of whether the consonant is palatal or not.
Irish orthography makes a great deal of sense. There are better ways to solve the problems of the large sound inventory, the fact that the sounds change even at the beginnings of words, and the large vowel inventory, but the solution they found is at least internally consistent. It’s just rather different from what English did to solve its differences from Latin.
I suspect that all these “silent” letters are not really silent, they are just too subtle for non-native speakers. Take, e.g., the name “Domhnall”: the “mh” is not silent, it produces a subtle sound that most of us will simply not hear. All languages seem to have these kind of elusive qualities.
I know when I speak English, I often leave a lot out, because it lets me. But when I need clarity, it is there for the drawing-out. Hence, all those unheard letters in the Gaelics are there, elided over when possible, but ready to serve when needed.
Your suspicion is mostly unfounded.
There certainly are sounds in Irish that English speakers don’t discern. Some dialects have four Ns, and I just can’t distinguish more than two. But a lot of the silent letters really and truly are slight, the same way (and for the same reasons) that the K & GH are silent in “knight.” I challenge you to hear the E in eolas: it’s not there. It was in Old Irish eólas.
The 20th century spelling reform got rid of most of the truly silent letters that weren’t functional, to the point that for reading Early Modern Irish, I have to use a Scottish Gaelic dictionary (neither Irish nor Scottish Gaelic are my main research languages—an Irish speaker would be able to work it out, I think).
Thanks Dr.Drake for the excellent explanation.
As in your example of ceann, Irish spelling inserts vowels to encode the difference between palatal and velar consonants - in this case the “e” indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalised. This is a very clever hack in my opinion, and it’s not obvious to me that any other option (e.g. diacritics on the consonants) would necessarily be better.
This approach is also used in Spanish, Italian, French, and English, where a “u” is added between the letter “g” and a following “i” or “e” to tell you that the “g” represents the [g] sound. We see it in English words such as “guest” and “guide”.
It may be worth mentioning that familiar English names like “Hugh”, “Michael”, “George”, “Geoffrey”, “Stephen”, and “Malcolm” have highly irregular spelling/pronunciation but English speakers don’t tend to notice because they are so, well, familiar. In the same way once you are familiar with names from other languages that follow their own non-English spelling rules (whether it’s Siobhán, Siân, Juanita, or Jeanne), they won’t seem unusual either.
Latin came up with the vowels that modify the preceding consonant, which is the reason they use the æ and œ ligatures. The practice spread into other languages, forcing them to adopt spelling tricks, such as “guerrero” vs “general” to control the “g” sound. The Romans had a lot of influence in Hibernia, so that is probably where they picked up their spelling methods.
As a speaker of the South Texas dialect of Spanish, I’d say some dialects have ll = j, which sounds odd to my ears 
.
Do you have a source for that? In earlier Classical Latin, AE and OE are diphthongs, A + E & O + E. They are etymologically distinct from plain E. There are all sorts of ligatures in Roman epigraphy, but AE & OE aren’t specifically written as such, as opposed to other letters, until much later, when their sound had changed to E.
The reason the Gs are different in Spanish general vs guerrero has nothing to do with the spelling, and everything to do with sound changes over time. In earlier Classical Latin, generālis was pronounced the same G you find in contemporary Spanish guerrero; it just changed, is all.
Equally, “the Romans had a lot of influence in Hibernia” is untrue. The Romans had a lot of influence in Britannia, and some exchange with Hibernia, but (1) Irish wasn’t even written with the Latin alphabet until long after the Roman withdrawal from Britain, and (2) direct Roman influence would mean the entire Old Irish spelling system was crazily and coincidentally following the Old Welsh spelling system, which relies on sound changes that happened between the Roman colonization of Britain and the medieval period.