29
but to get students to learn the sound value of the new letters. Wí sá him góing hóm, for instance, is an English sentence which represents the sound of a number of the letters, but does not give us a single Irish word. We were surprised ourselves, therefore, to find in the table such a large number of pure Irish words which are spoken as English every day in Ireland. If there is any reader who says “I can't speak a word of Irish” we would ask him to run through the following list, all taken from the examples above, for any Irish speaker and ask him what is the meaning of each word:—
Mac, fál, gé, bí, fí, sí, cró, dó cúl rúm, bé, fán, mó, mín, siuc, tá.
We promise him that he will have the proper blas, and that the Irish speaker will have no difficulty in understanding him.
More Irish Words.
All the Irish words in the preceding lesson are commonly spoken as English in Ireland. By analogy we can get the correct pronunciation of a number of purely Irish words which are not used as English. Thus, for instance, anybody who can pronounce the Irish word Mac, which is the English word mock written with the Irish alphabet, will also be able to pronounce the Irish word bac or any of the other Irish words given in the first line of the
