Preliminary Recommendations

 

Application to Irish

Since Irish, like the other Celtic languages, differs in some striking ways from the Romance and Germanic languages of Europe, it is of interest to see how it can be incorporated in the EAGLES framework. The major morphosyntactic peculiarities of Irish are:

• VSO word order;
• General complementizers `a' and `go' (somewhat similar to Greek `pou');
• Person, number and gender attributes on prepositions (as in Hebrew);
• A null value for person on verbs in all tenses and moods (a phenomenon known as the free verb);
• A vocative case for proper nouns (again, as in Greek);
• A dual form of the verb `to be': `is' and `tá';
• Initial mutations of two kinds: lenition and eclipsis (signalled as `+L' and `+E' in the application); and
• A velar-palatal (broad-slender) contrast for all consonants, a linguistic feature more common in the East of Europe than in the West.

The initial mutations and the palatalisation of final consonants are important parts of the morphosyntactic system. Orthographically, lenition is indicated by adding `h' to the initial consonant, and eclipsis by prefixing the mutated consonant to the base consonant. This gives word-initial sequences {bp, dt, gc, mb, nd, ng, bhf}. Palatalisation of final consonants is indicated by inserting an `i' before them. The quality of other consonants is indicated in a similar way by the adjoining vowels, `i' and `e' for palatal and `a',`o' and `u' for velar, which explains the large ratio of vowels to consonants in the written language.