In the old spelling, words like scéal and scian are spelt sgéal and sgian and I'm curious if there was a change in pronunciation at some point. I've tried saying scéal/sgéal and scian/sgian out loud, and to me they sound the same, no matter how much I try to emphasise the c or g. Why was sg dropped in favour of sc?

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They make the same sound,

traditionally you can spell "scéal" as scéal/sgéal/sccéal/sgéul/scéul/sccéul.

They dropped the "g" in favour of the "c" just as a means of standardising it and because "c" was used instead of "g" in the Old Irish version "scél".

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Yeah, compare Scottish Gaelic sgeul and sgian. Depending on dialect they're pronounced more or less the same as in Irish.

Up until the early 20th c. sg had been considerably more common than sc.
The primary cause of the change to sc was probably Dinneen's choice of that form for the dictionary he edited for the Irish Texts Society. Funnily enough, he had been instructed to use sg but characteristically went his own way.
According to the preface (1904 edition) the main reason for his decision was to make it uniform with sp and st.
Sg remained in use - probably at least as frequently as sc - but the weight given to sc by its use in Dinneen's dictionary was likely a major factor in the choice of that form by the creators of the C.O. orthography.

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(SL)(GM)

Thanks lads, that clears things up for me.

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I always use the pre CO spellings, including sg. One reason being the Scots do, they are more 'conservative', and tend to do less 'messing' than the Irish. We Irish do a lot of messing with the language, with nothing to show for it.

One of the justifications for SG over SC in Scottish Gaelic is the pre-aspiration of C (the insertion of a hhh or CH sound before the consonant). As you can only pre-aspirate after a vowel, and not another consonant, the combination SG is technically a better representation of the actual sound.

Of course, while that is all correct, if they were really following that logic, they would have changed SP to SB, and ST to SD for exactly the same reason... they didn't. They thought it looked weird.

To be consistent, they could have gone the other way and come to the same conclusion as Dineen, because SP was already pretty much universal, and ST was more common than SD... but I suspect there was an element of "Gàidhlig is different from Irish" in their final decision.

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The whole "Cha Ghaeilge Gàidhlig" thing is probably mostly also responible for the removal of the acute from Scottish spelling, which is horrible because now it's like Ulster Irish and you have to know by heart which vowel quality occurs when, only worse, because with Ulster Irish it's mostly about ó, whereas this happens with è ò à (as once opposed to é ó á) in Scottish Gaelic.

Sorry Hallow, but you've lost me here. I know that Scottish Gaelic has the síneadh fada slanted in the other direction, but apart from that I didn't understand your post. Are you saying that ó and ò represented two different vowels?

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