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How to spot AI Hallucinations like a Reference Librarian (originally on Substack)

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. 

Aislin is a variant of Aisling that I’ve seen, although I’m aware Aisling is the more common version by far (I think I’m biased to the no-g spelling because my first exposure to the name was a non-g Aislin). 

Orlaith has numerous acceptable spellings in use including the one I gave. I selected the one with an ‘f’ because it is the least intuitive spelling out there.  (versus “Orla” which is pretty much phonetic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orla_(name)

The use of bh for /v/ wasn’t someone simply copying the Latin ph. In fact, it originally wasn’t even spelled that way at all! The traditional Gaelic script used a dot above the letter rather than a digraph with h

This reflected a sound change that was also initially allophonic (and indeed, there was a period when it had become phonemic, but wasn’t yet indicated in the script, so b could be used for both sounds, and then that diacritic was adopted to distinguish the new sound, and then, of course, when new words were borrowed with the /v/ sound they logically used that same convention; using a diacritic was convenient since it made the change in spelling very minor and you could even add the diacritic to texts that didn’t make the distinction). When the traditional Gaelic script was replaced with the modern script, the dot diacritic was also replaced with a following h. That part was probably influenced by the use of consonant + h diacritics in other languages (especially English), but the fact that /v/ was indicated by an altered b was already there. That diacritic is still used, though, in contexts where the traditional Gaelic script is used

Because that historical lenition process is reflected in the grammatical phenomenon of mutation, the use of -h or the dot diacritic is quite useful, since an orthographic alternation between, e.g., an initial b- and an initial bh- preserves the relationship between the words much better than if it were something like b- and v-. Especially useful since several of the lenitions become homophones, if you’re looking up an unfamiliar word that occurs in lenited form, using a consistent orthographic representation (dot above or h) lets you easily figure out what the base form is. Dh and gh are pronounced the same, for example, but the use of that convention lets you know that if you encounter a word starting with dh- in its lenited form, you’d look it up in a dictionary with d-, and likewise gh- you look up under g-. If they were written the same way, you’d have to guess which letter the base form had

EDIT: Actually, I made an error on bh, although I was still correct about it not being a simple copying of ph. Quoting Wikipedia “In Old Irish, the overdot was only used for ⟨ḟ, ṡ⟩, while the following ⟨h⟩ was used for ⟨ch, ph, th⟩ and the lenition of other letters ⟨b, d, g, m⟩ was not indicated, lenition being generally understood due to word position (somewhat like in Danish). Later the two methods were used in parallel to represent lenition of any consonant (except ⟨l, n, r⟩) until the standard practice became to use the overdot in Gaelic type and the following ⟨h⟩ in Roman type. Thus the dotted letters (litreacha buailte “struck letters”) ⟨ḃ, ċ, ḋ, ḟ, ġ, ṁ, ṗ, ṡ, ṫ⟩ are equivalent to letters followed by a ⟨h⟩, i.e. ⟨bh, ch, dh, fh, gh, mh, ph, sh, th⟩.“