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Modern Irish: Grammatical Structure and Dialectal Variation (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics)

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This book would be of interest mostly to scholarly readers who have mastered the material in the author's -Learning Irish-. This is not a grammar, in the traditional sense; it is a survey of dialects, touching on the distinctive phonology of each.

And for such a dry subject, the book is unusually interesting. To attempt to summarise its thesis, the author maintains in effect that each speaker of Irish is an amateur etymologist. In the back of their minds, they have Platonic ideas of the words of the language, to which phonetic rules are applied to yield the spoken form. The book covers the phonetic rules that guide the several surviving dialects, and explains how the similar Ur-forms of the words yield the different results they do.

The book thus argues for the essential unity of Irish as a language, despite the divergence of its spoken forms. It also generates some sympathetic understanding for the cumbersome and daunting traditional orthography.