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the language, they are not our chief concern. With regard to the first class, any of them who can read English will be able to read our Irish at first sight. They will not require any drilling in the sound values of the letters. The second class certainly require such a drilling, and they are catered for specially in the “Lessons for Learners.”
There remain the other two classes, both of whom are presumed to know the value of the old Roman or Gaelic letters. For these a brief explanation of our alphabet will be sufficient. They will see from the table given below that there are at least thirty-four consonant sounds that have to be represented. There are really more, for there are the sounds represented by double “l” and double “n,” which can continue to be written as they are at present. As there are, therefore, at least thirty-six sounds to be represented by consonants, it will be seen that it would not be possible to have a separate symbol for each sound without adopting the technical alphabet of the Association Phonétique, or inventing a new set of symbols which could not be useful for practical everyday purposes. That difficulty was overcome in the Gaelic alphabet by the adoption of the system of glides; that is, putting a broad or slender vowel in contact with a consonant to indicate the quality of the consonant. That system has been adopted for the new alphabet, and we thus get two sounds, broad and slender, for each consonant. With us, how-
