NativLang's video: Irish Words Can Mutate

Before you pronounce Irish names or thumb through a dictionary, you should know that Irish words do something quite unusual. They can mutate their starting sounds. Subscribe for language: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=NativLang Be my patron: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=584038 ~ CREDITS ~ Outro theme - Celtic by Joshua LF Mitchell https://soundcloud.com/joshualfmitchell https://twitter.com/jlfm97 https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCwTYGa4jPUrZ-Ols4XXUjhQ Art, narration and animation by Josh from NativLang Doc full of sources for claims and credits for imgs, music and sfx: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10E-LulQznrlPYXv41ky3Jy3he41fMLUonyLEf7Riw0c/ ~ CORRECTIONS ~ "i nGaeilge" : "as Gaeilge" is the expected phrase here! Thank you to multiple commenters for pointing this out. ~ I GCUPLA FOCAL, BRIEFLY ~ I'm preparing a video that explores the entire history of Irish. As I stitch together my notes, I'm noticing I often just have time to name-drop terms like "Proto-Celtic" and "Ogham". Today let's spend time on one of the more unusual ones: "initial mutations". Archaic or "Primitive Irish" had neat Celtic syllables, but when Old Irish pops in just a couple centuries later, it's already full of worn-out endings and these strange mutations. Two types. First, lenition: a word's starting sound gets softer, like /p/ turning into /f/. Second, eclipse: the starting sound gets more voiced or nasalized. The textbook Sengoídelc adds a third type, aspiration: adding h before a vowel. What makes these devious is that they're triggered by grammar. We'll take a look at a few examples. I'll close out by thinking about how Irish's "will mutate for grammar" strategy likely developed. I'll also consider how, even though they now look so uniquely Celtic, mutations are not inherited from the common Proto-Celtic ancestor.