Irish, Old Irish and Manx

Almost all applications support Modern Irish accents. Guidelines for typing and using accents are given below.

About Irish

About Irish

Irish is a Goedelic Celtic language spoken in several areas of Ireland and is closely related to Scottish Gaelic and Manx and more distantly related to Welsh, Breton and Cornish. In fact, many words in Irish and Scottish Gaelic are identical, but spelled with differently angled accents.

Note on Term "Gaelic"

Historically, the name "Gaelic" refers to the Celtic languages spoken in Ireland and Highland Scotland. Some sources refer to Irish as "Gaelic", but some speakers find that term objectionable in modern contexts. The term Irish or Modern Irish is the least controversial term to use, although the native language name Gaeilge can able be used.

Manx

Manx (language code gv) is a language related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, but its spelling system is much closer to English and does not use accented letters.

Irish Links

• Focal an Lae (Word of the Day) – See other Dennis (Donncha) King resources
• Eo Feasa Irish Lessons
• Wikipedia Irish Language

Windows ALT Codes

In Windows, combinations of the ALT key plus a numeric code from the number keypad can be used to type a non-English character in any Windows application.

See the detailed instructions on the ALT Code How To for complete information on implementing the code. Additional options for entering accents in Windows are also listed in the Accents section of this Web site.

Alt Codes for typing Modern Irish characters:

Windows International Keyboard Codes

In order to use these codes you must activate the U.S. international keyboard. Once the U.S. International keyboard has been activated, you can use the codes below.

Note: There is no method to input Old Irish dotted letters in the International Keyboard.

Macintosh Accent Codes

Here are the basic Mac Option codes for Modern Irish accents.

Old Irish Characters

Dotted Letters

Old Irish spelling uses a series of dotted letters for lenited consonants instead of modern letter+h (e.g. ṡ, ḟ for sh,fh). The most commonly used dotted letters in Old Irish grammars and primers is ṡ and ḟ, although the use of other dotted letters is also attested in some older Irish language signs. The letters ṡ,ḟ,ḃ,ḋ,ġ,ṗ,ṫ,ċ,ṁ can always be substituted with sh,fh,bd,dh,gh,ph,th,ch,mh (and ṙ,ṅ can be replaced with r,n).

Fonts for Dotted Letters

Modern versions of many fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Palatino, Cambria and others include dotted letters. However many decorative fonts may be missing these characters

Note: Information on generating dotted letters in different platforms and tools is included below under each platform and tool where available.

Ameragus and Insular Characters

A commonly seen Old Irish abbreviation is the amperagus, to represent the word "and". In form it resembles the number 7, but does have its own code point in Unicode (⁊ or "7" – U+204A). Finally, the insular letter forms for d,g or Ꝺ,ᵹ and others are encoded in Unicode as well.

Fonts for Ameragus and Insular Character Forms

Although these characters are in the Unicode standard, they are not present in many fonts. The list below includes fonts which do have these characters.

• Palemonas MUFI – Comprehensive and Includes bold/Italic
• Quivira Font – Also very comprehensive
• Andron Scriptor Web
• See also the MUFI Font page.

Old Irish Character Codes

Windows Word ALT Codes

The following numeric codes work only in Microsoft Word, and you must use the numeric keypad. More detailed instructions about typing accents with ALT keys are available.

These characters can also be inserted from the Character Map.

Macintosh Codes

Dotted Letters

Irish And Sign (Trionian Et) and Insular

To use the option codes below, you must activate and switch to the Unicode Hex Input Keyboard. Note that not all letters have a separate "Insular" counterpart.

HTML Accent Codes

Unicode Encoding

If you use long marks, Unicode (utf-8) is the required encoding for Web sites. If the following encodings are used instead, you may encounter display problems:

Avoid These

• iso-8859-1 (Latin 1),
• iso-8859-15 (Latin with euro (€) symbol)
• win-1252 (Windows 1)

Note: There is a "Celtic" Latin-8/Latin-14 standard (ISO-8859-14), but it has been supplanted by Unicode. Few applications support this standard.

Language Tags

Language Tags allow browsers and other software to process text more efficiently.

Language Codes:

• ga (Irish)
• sga (Old Irish/Sean Gaeilge)
• mga (Middle Irish)
• gv (Manx)
• gd (Scottish Gaelic)
• pgl (Primitive Irish/Ogham)

HTML Entity Codes

Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type fáilte you would type fáilte.

The numbers in parentheses are the numeric codes assigned in Unicode encoding. For instance, because á is number 225, fáilte can also be used to input fáilte. These numbers are also used with the Windows Alt codes listed above.

Note on Old Irish Dotted Letters

The most commonly used dotted letters in Old Irish grammars and primers is ṡ and ḟ, although the use of other dotted letters is also attested in some older Irish language signs. The letters ṡ,ḟ,ḃ,ḋ,ġ,ṗ,ṫ,ċ,ṁ can always be substituted with sh,fh,bd,dh,gh,ph,th,ch,mh (and ṙ,ṅ can be replaced with r,n).

HTML Entity Codes for Modern Irish Accented Vowels and Characters:

HTML Entity Codes for Old Irish characters

Links

Irish Links

• Focal an Lae (Word of the Day) – See other Dennis (Donncha) King resources
• Eo Feasa Irish Lessons
• Wikipedia Irish Language

Linux/Unix

• Linux Accent Codes (English)
• Aistriúchán Gaeilge GNU/Linux

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