Does anybody here have insight into the evolution of aspiration and eclipses in the Irish Language?? In older forms of Irish, were the rules for aspiration and eclipses the same? Was the effect they have on pronunciation the same?

Aspiration --> putting an h after the leading consonant of a word
Eclipses --> Putting a new consonant in front of the word, which mutes the former leading consonant

I ask this because in the dictionary "aspiration" is defined as "an audible emission of breath". In Irish, aspiration can have a much stronger effect than just an audible emission of breath, for example b --> bh turns a "b" sound into a "v" sound, and similarly for m --> mh, d--> dh.

Somewhere I heard that eclipses serve to make the pronunciation more "nasal". Yet it seems that eclipsing a word can have a much stronger effect on the pronunciation than this, for example b --> mb (changing a b sound to an m sound).

I mean, the Irish language was around before it adopted the English alphabet. I heard at one point that aspiration was once denoted by putting a "dot" above the leading consonant, rather than putting an "h" behind it. I'm wondering if it is possible that in adopting the English alphabet, some of the effects on pronunciation and rules for when they occur could have changed.

Is there an older form of Irish where "Aspiration" simply adds a audible emission of breath, rather than changing the sound of the consonant? Likewise, is there an older form of Irish where the "Eclipse" simply makes the sound more nasal rather than changing the sound of the consonant?

Thank you for your time! I'm really enjoying my journey into the Irish Language!

I'll be able to give a more detailed response to this later when I have a bit more time. This is just a quick comment to clarify some terminology and other historical bits.

EDIT: In Old Irish (roughly 7th-10th centuries) the rules for lenition (aspiration) and eclipsis were more or less the same. Some modern dialects use them in different ways to each other, but by and large they're triggered by the same factors, for example, following possessive pronouns (mo, do, a "his", ár, bhur, a "their"), and in particular grammatical cases. Here isn't the place to go into a discussion of all the things that can trigger mutations, but, just know that as a phenomenon it hasn't changed much in over a millennium.

To answer your question, the affect they have on pronunciation was broadly the same also. Certain letters in Old Irish were pronounced differently. For example, c, p, and t, would have been voiced (like g, b, and d) except at the beginning of a word. However, when lenited or eclipsed, they would have sounded much the same as they do in Modern Irish. It has been suggested to me that originally (and even until quite recently) lenited m and b would have been made by the lips only, not the lips and teeth as is common now. The sound is very similar, however, it's easy to see how the softening (lenition) of m and b would evolve to making a v sound with this bilabial fricative being an intermediate stage in the sound's evolution.

A few other exceptions exist. Relative clauses could be indicated in Old Irish grammar, for example, by using lenition or eclipsis within the verbal complex. This doesn't happen anymore because the verbal system of Modern Irish is significantly simplified. It's worth mentioning that Modern Irish uses mutations to indicate the tense of some verbs. This didn't really happen in Old Irish, but where it does happen in Modern Irish it is the result of historical words which would have originally preceded the verb which have since been lost. These now lost words can be traced back to Old Irish where they would have triggered mutations in accordance with set grammatical rules, as you'd expect.

If you go back even further than Old Irish, and look at Ogham inscriptions, you can see that the language is quite different. The Primitive Irish which can be found on the earliest Ogham inscriptions retains the case endings you can also find in other Indo-European languages like Gaulish, Latin, and Greek. So you get BROINIENAS, which becomes Bróen, NETTA becomes Nad, TTRENALUGOS becomes Trianlug, MAQI becomes Mac, etc. To radically oversimplify the matter, by the Old Irish period, where you get mutations at the start of words, it results from these old case endings. Though they had already been lost in the language by the Old Irish period, where they would have otherwise occurred they continue to affect the pronunciation at the anlaut of the following word. This phenomenon is not unique to Irish, by the way. The same process also occurred with the British Celtic languages like Welsh.



I know that you're working with Dillon and Ó Cróinín's "Teach Yourself Irish", and this uses the term "aspiration" as you explain it above. This is generally referred to now as "lenition" because the term "aspiration" can cause this phenomenon to be conflated with the "h-mutation" whereby "h" is prefixed to vowels. This "h-mutation" fits the description of "aspiration" you've given above much more closely, and I think is what people generally mean to reference now when they use the term "aspiration" in an Irish context.



As for nasalisation, or eclipsis making the sound more "nasal", that is exactly what is happening in the example you give of b --> mb. B is a voiced labial plosive. This means the sound is made by blocking the flow of air with the lips, then letting it out all in an instant. Note, unlike the m sound, the b sound cannot be sustained. Otherwise, however, b and m sounds are created by placing the lips together in the same way. The difference is that, with m, air is allowed flow out the nose. This is why it's hard to pronounce m when you are sick, your nasal passage is blocked. M and N both have this nasal airflow in common, and so these are considered "nasals". Hence, when eclipsis turns b --> m or d --> n or g --> ng, these are all nasals.



Irish never adopted the English alphabet. Rather, the English and Irish both adopted the Latin alphabet. Before this point both Irish and English scholars would have been writing Latin using this alphabet for a couple of centuries. Notably, it seems that Irish scholars began using the Latin alphabet with their vernacular language first. Because we know this, and because we know that Irish scholars were very active in post-Roman Britain from about the 5th or 6th century onwards, and that they set up many centres of learning there, it actually seems likely that the Irish inspired the adoption of the Latin alphabet for use with English, and not the other way around.

The use of the dot above a consonant to show lenition was not a precursor to the use of h after that letter to show lenition. Both occur in Old Irish manuscripts. In Old Irish their usage was more distinct from one another. The dot was typically used with s and f, while the h was used with c, p and t. In later stages of the language they fell together and either could be used. Neither ever fell out of usage, but the dot became more commonly used apparently in the 17th or 18th century and continued to be until the middle of the 20th century. As the dot wasn't supported by technologies like the telegram and ascii encodings it became more common to use the h for lenition again, and the h was eventually adopted into the official standard of Irish which is taught in school curriculums, which made it much more widely used. Nevertheless, neither form of lenition ever entirely fell out of use and many (myself included) prefer the use of the dot even today.



Learners of Old Irish will typically refer to eclipsis simply as nasalisation. If you would like to understand their philological development a bit more, you could look into Thurneysen's A Grammar of Old Irish.

EDIT: to add the extra detail I promised.

English alphabet?

It is called Latin alphabet for a reason.