mürk wrote:
Seems plausible at first sight.
However, Ó Dónaill came out in 1977, but according to Wikipedia, gaelic types were used until mid-20th century, perhaps no further than 1950s or early 1960s. And it seems to me that one doesn't need to consult dictionaries to use 'sc' instead of 'sg'. That could independently occur to anyone not too entrenched in traditions, as it is the actual way they are pronounced.
Is it? Older speakers in the Munster Gaeltacht have been known to say - I've been told by them - that the pronunciation is sg-.
I think it is clearly /sk/, but unlike k elsewhere, it is not aspirated (with a puff of breath), and so may seem to non-linguists to be like a g. But even Brian Ó Cuív in the Irish of West Muskerry (an incredible source otherwise) stated the pronunciation was with g. I think he must have meant, not a voiced g, but a non-aspirated k. So you see the confusion.
I regard sc as a spelling mistake
tout court. Because in any language there are things in the orthography that don't correspond to the pronunciation as such. Like "i mBaile Átha Cliath", where the pronunciation is "a mBleá Cliath", where the "i" is more like an "a". But as this spelling mistake is insisted on by everyone, I don't think the sg spelling is available nowadays, and so when I republished Niamh by Peadar Ua Laoghaire, I used sc.