Came the priest of the pattens and the clerk of the bells. The pair were married. When they were married there were three champions there. They asked him if he knew them. He said that he knew them; that it was they gave him the gifts. There came a beautiful girl then. She asked him if he knew her. He said he did not know.
“Well,” said she, “I was in the place of the nine-legged steed, and those are my three brothers, and I am sister to them. We were all under spells till your wife was married.”
I found the ford; they the stepping-stones. They were drowned, and I came away.
When folk-lore is narrated by peasants in their own dialect, it seems desirable, for various reasons, that the tales should be recorded in that dialect, and not in some form of speech differing from it more or less widely. This being conceded, the question arises, when one takes to recording Irish folk-lore, how the object is to be attained. It needs but a very small acquaintance with the ordinary Irish orthography to perceive that, if it is adhered to, the object cannot be even aimed at. The greatest defect in the English language is admitted to be its extraordinary spelling. But in this respect it is completely outdone by Irish Gaelic, which is troubled in an aggravated form with every evil that afflicts English. Different sounds are written in the same way. Identical sounds are written in different ways. Silent letters attain to a tropical forestine luxuriance, through which the tongue of the learner despairs of hewing a way. There are, moreover, cases in which there is no indication in writing of single sounds, and even syllables, which are actually pronounced; and there is at least one case of a word being written as if it began with a vowel, while it really begins with a consonant.
One of the chief reasons for this state of affairs is the attempt which has been made to represent an exceedingly numerous and varied series of sounds with a meagre alphabet of eighteen letters. The system of orthography developed, though highly ingenious, has proved entirely inadequate to its purpose. But if this be true of the so-called classical speech of the few educated persons, whose original pronunciation has been to some slight extent modified by the influence of books, far more decidedly must it be affirmed of the actual peasant dialects which, for two hundred years at least, have taken each of them its own way, uncontrolled by any central influence. Of these the mere sounds cannot be given at all on the basis of the common spelling. Here are two of the simplest examples. The Donegal pronunciation of the word “tá” cannot be written by any device known to Irish orthography; neither can the Kerry pronunciation of “glean.” The strange spectacle is sometimes witnessed of an attempt to give the actual sound of Irish words by means of a spelling based on English values,—of Chaos applying for help to Confusion.