I argued it was viewed as wrong - this means by the very meaning of the phrase that grammarians stated it was wrong, which I have shown. I made no statement that everyone in their private writing adhered to the rules, such as they were, nor that people adhered to them before those rules were ever formulated. And the synthetic verb forms were the original correct ones. The analytical verb forms are a later development.

The grammatical tracts relate to Middle Irish, the final recension of which was Classical Irish. That is a different language to Modern Irish. I don't know how much, IF ANYTHING, is in the grammatical tracts on punctuation. I suspect nothing.

As I stated, in the pre-Standardisationi period, it was considered correct to use the hyphen. Some people may have been trying to bring a different standard into existence, yes, but most books reflected Dinneen's dictionary and its usages. The most prolific writer ever in Irish - Peadar Ua Laoghaire - used the hyphen consistently in his manuscripts. Haghaidh is an error, as there is no such Irish word. Nonetheless, in my version of Niamh I did not use the hyphen, purely in order not to deviate from what most learners regard as correct, when the point at issue didn't make any different to the dialect as such.

Only if by “later” you mean “Middle Irish”. At least some analytical forms exist in Irish texts from 12th century if not earlier. Ragaid missi (as if raghaidh mise in modern spelling) and ragatsa (~raghadsa) coexist in a single poem, Bórama, in Lebor Laignech – they seem to be a northern innovation that reached Munster very late, hence synthetic verbs in common use there and PUL’s objection to the use of analytical verbs. The Classical Gaelic bardic standard allowed the use of both synthetic and analytical forms side by side, and it was created during the late 12th century.

Yes, silmeth, you're right on that. The Grammatical Tracts allowed both uses. Bedell's Bible has both.

You would have saved us all a lot of time if you had simply admitted you were wrong in the first place.

"Ró-tuirseach" is fine. Many real native speakers say it that way.

I was right all along -- as I showed. The Grammatical Tracts do not relate to modern Irish. O'Donovan's grammar of 1845 and Dinneen's dictionary are authoritative works relating to modern Irish.

Do they? Ró-tuirseach without a lenited t? Which dialect? Which Gaeltacht village? Or are you, as I suspect, talking about the poor Irish of learners in the Galltacht? I'm prepared to be shown I am wrong on this - if you can name the Gaeltacht village whose Irish that is.

See potafocal on this: http://www.potafocal.com/beo/?s=r%C3%B3thuirseach

First, let’s look at Dinneen’s dictionary (the second edition, but similar examples are in the first one too), we find among others a haon or ó ṁaidin go hoiḋċe, alongside na h-uaire:



So, doesn’t seem an Duinníneach was very consistent here himself, whatever his views on the matter.

Also the passage from O’Donovan’s grammar you cited says nothing about h-prothesis – it’s exclusively about marking preposition + possessive pronoun compounds. Sure, O’Donovan himself uses the hyphen, but does he argue this is in any way “more correct” in his book? What he says about h is:


Thus, since it’s not a consonant in its full right, it doesn’t matter if you separate it with a hyphen or not, it’s always just a prefix (this, obviously, isn’t strictly true, there are modern borrowings starting with an actual /h/ written as h, like eg. hata – but he doesn’t consider those here at all). O’Donovan also hyphenates eclipsis (thus a d-tiġ ‘in a house’), he even explicitly says “The eclipsing consonant is separated, in some modern books, from the radical one by a hyphen (…) the hyphen placed by the moderns between the m and the b is now preferable” – does this make a dtiġ or i dtiġ not authentic?

Then, a 100 years earlier, in 1728, Mac Curtin’s grammar writes those without a hyphen (and it also is a Modern Irish grammar, although heavily influenced by the bardic tradition and pretty archaizing in places).

(Of course, those early grammars often have lots of complete nonsense too, like O’Donovan claiming that in “ancient manuscripts” (but citing examples from not-that-ancient Keating too) eclipsis is put “merely for euphony, for no grammatical reason whatever” just because, it seems, he does not understand classical accusative or Old Irish neuter.)

Anyway, the point is, writing h-prefix without the hyphen was a common practice throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, even if opposed by PUL, and if O’Donovan, Ó Nualláin, and some others wrote the hyphen themselves. An Duinníneach was inconsistent, Eleanor Knott, when editing PUL with his approval, did not use the hyphen, neither generally did the typesetters of Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge. So again, saying that writing h-prefix without the hyphen is not authentic for Gaelic type, or that it is a later post-Roman script thing, is just plainly not true. The hyphen was never a universally agreed-upon standardized convention.

Saying that “a few grammarians in the 19th and early 20th century considered writing it with the hyphen to be a better practice” could be true, but that’s not the claim you made.

They are not just a few grammarians - as if there were 100s of Irish grammars published in the 19th century. O'Donovan's grammar was the main grammar, indeed the first full grammar of Irish, until the Christian Brothers' Grammar of the 20th century. He doesn't comment specifically on h-, but comments on other similar things. The weakness of the points you are making is that few native speakers of Irish have ever written in a standard way in any period. Few can do so today, and few could do so in the Dinneen period (see a h-aon on p580 of his dictionary), and few could do so in the O'Donovan period or before. But grammarians regarded it as correct to spell h- with a hyphen. Eleanor Knott was not a native speaker of Irish. I don't know if she edited Táin Bó, but if you tell me she did, I would believe it. There is no evidence that Ua Laoghaire approved the galley-proofs of his works before final publication, and plenty that publishers and editors often fiddled with his spelling.