IpseDixit wrote:Hi everyone, I'm not interested in learning Irish (well, not for now at least), but I have a burning curiosity to know why sometimes there's a capital letter in the middle of a word, can you explain to me why that is and what its use is?
It's quite simple, really. Like all living Celtic languages, Irish has initial consonant mutations. In most of these languages, the orthographic convention is to replace the consonant, e.g. Cymraeg "Welsh" > yn Gymraeg "in Welsh". In Irish (and Scottish Gaelic), however, the practice is to prefix the resulting consonant to the original consonant, e.g. Gaeilge "Irish" > i nGaeilge "in Irish". [Pronounced with initial [ŋ].] This happens with all words (e.g. i ngeall, i ngaire, go ngabhad), but it only stands out when a proper noun is involved.