dia daoibh a chairde gaeil, for the life of me i cant remember, am i correct in thinking that "too hot" is "róthé" with the h? the h is the part that is messing me around

'maith agaibh

róthe

Generally speaking the h is used in compound words (or words with prefixes) when the DNTLS rule doesn't get in the way: seanmháthair but seanduine. There are exceptions like coiscéim and fótagraf.

Is is usual to write compounds with "ró" solid like that, or would the hyphenated form (ró-the) be more common?

Redwolf

No hyphen usually in standard Irish. You will regularly see a hyphen used but you won't find many in the dictionary, except for the likes of ró-óg or perhaps a small number of other cases to avoid confusion in pronounciation.

GRMA

Normally, the hyphen is only used when the 2nd element begins with a vowel (ró-óg, ró-álainn...), or sometimes, as Scooby said, to avoid confusions about pronunciation. But in most cases, before a consonant, you don't use any hyphen in the modern spelling: róthe, rófhuar, róbhreá, ródhorcha....

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

Which is why I was scrabbling around trying to think what rómhall meant the other day in one of L's comments, and then the penny suddenly dropped.

Why are we still dropping and spending pennies and not cents....? Sorry, slightly OT!

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Didn't/don't the Americans regularly refer to a single cent as a penny?

By the way, when I was young I swallowed a penny (thankfully not one of those bigger old ones). I went to the doctor who said it should pass naturally through my body and would reappear when I spent a penny! (really)

The doctor called by the next day to see how I was. No change!!! (Okay, that bit didn't happen)

I was fine in the end, but a bit sore on the whole.