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The weakness of the points you are making is that few native speakers of Irish have ever written in a standard way in any period.
Is this weakness of my point (that the two conventions coexisted, both were authentic; and I gave examples of published texts in Irish, written by native speakers, from 17th to 20th century – even if the later ones not always edited or typeset by native speakers), or a weakness of the points you are making? You make some claims about what is authentic and what is not, completely removed from the actual usage (by anyone who’s not an authority
according to you). You also disregard the grammars written in 18th century.
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They are not just a few grammarians - as if there were 100s of Irish grammars published in the 19th century. O'Donovan's grammar was the main grammar, indeed the first full grammar of Irish, until the Christian Brothers' Grammar of the 20th century. He doesn't comment specifically on h-, but comments on other similar things.
Except that they are not “similar things” at all. He comments on compounds of prepositions and possessive pronouns, which has nothing to do with mutations. He also comments on eclipsis (suggesting spelling that wasn’t used much outside of his grammar!). None of those cases deals with a letter that, according to him, an Irish word cannot begin with in its radical form, a letter that shouldn’t really be considered a letter at all – this is very different to eclipsis or t-prefixing, or n-prefixing, or compound forms.
You also make claims about views of authors (like Dinneen) who were not consistent themselves – even if they leaned towards the hyphen (and again… are those views explicitly expressed by them anywhere?).
And, going back, the fact that “few native speakers of Irish have ever written in a standard way” is an argument for multiple conventions being equally authentic.
(Even though the spelling, at least of words and mutations, was quite standardized long before modern times; the conventions were changing throughout the centuries – but the manuscripts aren’t written in a completely haphazard manner, they show fairly standardized continued tradition.)So you are arguing that the only “authentic” thing is some standard that never existed and was adhered to by no one, not even by PUL (did he ever write the likes of
i d-tiġ, a ḃ-fuil with a hyphen?). I’m arguing that authentic is whatever can be found in published texts written by native speakers using the script. And that means both
a haon and
a h-aon.