12
which in recent years has been aroused in the science of phonetics as applied to Irish. In the old days it used to be thought that if the Roman letters, or the English letters, as they used to be called, were used for writing Irish, students of the language would bring the English sounds of the letters into the Irish words. The work of the Rev. Dr. O’Daly has, however, largely revolutionised men’s minds on this question. He came to Ireland and found the students pronouncing Irish words in lumps and calling the Irish letters by their English names, and he set to work to teach the people the sound values which the letters represented and the way in which they should use their vocal organs to produce these sounds. Dr. O’Daly found Irish spelling regular, that is to say according to certain complicated rules, but he soon discovered in actual experience that the time which was spent in learning these rules could be much more profitably employed in learning the language itself. Since then he has boldly. advocated reform and has done more than any other man to create the public opinion which makes this effort in “The Irish Packet” possible.
Spread Irish like Wildfire.
In a remarkable speech delivered in Kilkenny last year, Dr. O’Daly said that he had some to the conclusion, from a varied experience of teaching Irish to priests, nuns, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and all classes of society down to the illiterate, that if they meant to spread Irish as a real living lan-
