Don't Look

The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.

Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse. 

They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.

And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.

Let’s start with <bh>. Now, the Latin alphabet at the time didn’t have a letter for the /v/ sound, but it did have an alternative way of writing the /f/ sound, which was spelled <ph> when it was borrowed from Greek (for other historical reasons). Well, /p/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a burst of air out from behind your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless bilabial stop), and /f/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a small amount of air out from behind your teeth on your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless labiodental fricative). So <ph> is kind of like a more breathy <p> (/h/ is a fricative like /f/). And /b/ is the same as /p/ except your vocal cords ARE vibrating, the exact same way that /v/ is like /f/. 

So <p> is to <ph> as <b> is to <bh>. 

Adding <h> to a consonant to indicate a sound somewhat similar to the base letter was very common in post-Latin Europe: English, Irish, French, German, and many other European languages ended up with <ch>, <sh>, <th>, <gh>, <wh>, and so on. It just happens that some h versions are found in some languages and not others, and pretty much every language uses the h variations to stand for different sounds. (Especially “ch”). 

Now let’s get to vowels. There are two groups of them: /i/ and /e/ are one group, while /u/, /o/ and /a/ are another. The traditional Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) terms for these groups are that /i, e/ are slender and /u, o, a/ are broad, but linguists also split them up, as front and back vowels. 

Front vowels /i/ and /e/ tend to pull consonants along with them, in very many languages, especially /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/. It’s a process called palatalization and there’s a whole Wikipedia article about it. So the <si> in words like “Sinead” is palatalized just like the <si> in Latin-derived words like “precision” (not to mention all the words in “-tion” and rapid speech pronunciations like “didja” and “gotcha”). Palatalization also explains why English has “hard” (=broad=non-palatalized) and “soft” (=slender=palatalized) pronunciations of <c> and <g>, which are split by the same set of vowels – compare “cat” “cot” “cut” with “ceiling” or “cite”. (The pronunciation of <g> is more complicated which is why no one can agree about “gif”.)

And English spelling also retains or adds a silent letter where it would cause palatalization confusion. Think about words like “peaceable”, “placeable”, “changeable”, “salvageable” – normally a silent “e” is dropped before -able (bribable, adorable), but it’s kept here. Or the “k” added in “mimicking”, “frolicking”, “picnicking” despite “mimic, frolic, picnic”.  

Mutation (changing the initial sound of a word for grammatical effect) does seem to be particular to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family tree, although various kinds of mutations are found in other languages. 

read that, again. 

things I need to beat into my brain

finland’s lapland is home to over twenty thousand reindeer, but with thousands killed every year due to vehicle collisions in the dark, herders now cover the animals’ antlers with a harmless fluorescent paint that glows in the light of oncoming cars, but is otherwise invisible. both female and male reindeer in lapland grow antlers, which they shed in the spring, so a new coating is reapplied in the fall.