Intrusive T or Why we're writing sròn not *stròn

Ermm ... for the sake of all our sanity, I'll keep the explanation of *why* short. Phonetically, [r] and [d] are quite similar to each other - both are articulated at the same place using the tip of your tongue, the only difference really is the length of contact. Plus, because Gaelic only does that in sr clusters, there's an added articulatory reason.

Actually, just taking a quick trip round the world, languages often change [d] into [r] and vice versa. In American English for example the -tt- between vowels has become much like [r] in words like matted, butter etc. Anyway.

So Gaelic introduces a [d] sound in sr clusters (but doesn't replace the r). The northern dialects anyway, as you can see on the map below.

This gives rise to a never ending stream of discussions about spelling. Is it sruth or struth or even *sdruth? The answer is complicated. A quick cross-check with Irish and Old Irish tells us that indeed there was no such sound many moons ago:

Old Irish	Irish	Gaelic
srath	srath [srah]	srath [sdrah]
srón	srón [sroːn]	sròn [sdrɔːn]
sreth	sreath [srah]	sreath [sdrɛh]

So what's the problem? Twofold, really. The [sdr] pronunciation has been dominant for so long, it has started to creep into the spelling bit by bit and with overall literacy rates in Gaelic dropping and dropping over the centuries, people have followed the conventions less and their ears more. Similar to the slochd/sloc problem.

But the main problems are lenition and loanwords. Loanwords, like strì or stràbh show one peculiarity - unlike sròn and srath, you can't lenite them:

	sròn ⇨	mo shròn
srath ⇨	mo shrath
strì ⇨	mo strì
stràbh ⇨	mo stràbh

So, the neat solution is, if you can't lenite it, spell it str, if you can, spell it sr. You'd end up mostly with loanwords on the str side and mostly with native Gaelic words on the other. So as a rule of thumb, if it looks a bit like an English word, it probably has unlenitable [sdr] and should be spelled str.