Irish
The Irish Language is a Celtic language spoken on the island of Ireland. It is one of the official languages of the Republic of Ireland.
This page gives some general information for non-Irish speakers encountering Irish for the first time. If you're an Irish speaker or learner, please consider contributing to one of DP's Irish Language Projects. For information on the special script used in many older Irish texts, see Cló Gaelach.
For Proofers
Non-Irish speaking reviewers may encounter Irish words or phrases in texts primarily written in English. This should be fairly straightforward, but a few tips may help explain any unfamiliar things you may encounter:
- Modern Irish is generally written in Roman script; however, some documents may be written in an older script called Cló Gaelach. The PM should give special instructions if this is the case. If they haven't, ask in the project discussion.
- There is one diacritical marking in Irish: the fada, an acute accent used only on vowels. Sometimes these are handwritten into a typeset text; any type of mark above a vowel is likely a fada.
- Irish words sometimes undergo a process called eclipsis. This changes the first sound of the word, and also adds a letter or two to the front of the word. As a proofer, what you need to know is that when the word is capitalised, the capital letter comes after these added letters. So you will see words in Irish like:
Amhrán na bhFiann
Transcribe these as written; they are not typos. - Traditionally, Irish used the Tironian et (⁊) rather than the ampersand (&) to indicate "agus," meaning "and." If you see an et in a project, and there's nothing in the project comments, please ask in the discussion thread.
- In Irish printed in Roman type, unless page images are very clear, it can be easy to confuse i and í; be careful! In Cló Gaelach, the i character does not have a dot, making it easier to tell when there is a fada.
- Common scannos in Roman type include:
- f and í
- i and í
- c and r
- fi and h
For Content Providers and Project Managers
Script Issues
(Main page: Cló Gaelach)
While modern Irish is written in ordinary Roman type, many older Irish texts in the U.S. public domain are printed in Cló Gaelach, a unique script used only for writing Irish. OCR trained in Roman type cannot read Cló Gaelach; you will need to use specialised OCR or type in the project by hand.
Cló Gaelach may also be used in some cases as blackletter type is in English, for emphasis or decoration. Consider asking formatters to mark it with <f> tags for the postprocessor.
Et and Ampersand
If your project uses the Tironian et (⁊) instead of an ampersand, be sure to leave a note in the project comments explaining how you'd like it handled. If you want to retain the et character instead of using an ampersand, you will need to add it as a custom character.
