Accent bereavement or how to live without é and ó

Since it came up the other day again, I've finally made time to explain how one can work around the loss of é and ó in GOC. It's actually not that hard and my guess is, while nobody bothered explaining that on any page of any of the ultra-thin GOC publications, that was probably their gut reasoning for ditching it.

So to begin with, in Old and Middle Irish, long /eː/ and /ɛː/ and long /oː/ and /ɔː/ most likely already co-existed as sounds. But only the acute accent (´) - though it often looked more like a macron (e.g. ē) was used to mark length.

Fast forward to Scottish Gaelic, so some time between the arrival of the Dal Riada and the 12th centruy onwards, because the difference between /eː/ and /ɛː/ and long /oː/ and /ɔː/ is now very clearly there, some writers start differentiating them in writing, continuing to use the acute for /eː/ é and /oː/ ó but innovating the use of the grave for /ɛː/ è and /ɔː/ ò. Which, incidentally, eventually also became the norm for the other long vowel letters ì à ù too.

Fast forward again to 20th century and GOC decides to drop the acute. Stepping around whether that was a good idea or not, I want to focus instead on how to work around that. Because however you spell them, clearly Gaelic still has all four sounds, /eː/ vs /ɛː/ and /oː/ vs /ɔː/. Of course native speakers know which word has which sound, but what do you do as a learner, now the acute is largely dead in Scotland?

Fortunately the answer is relatively simple: by a process of elimination. There are relatively few words in Gaelic which have /ɛː/ and /oː/, which means that if you learn which two dozen or so words have /ɛː/ and /oː/, you then know that any other word is almost guaranteed to have /eː/ and /ɔː/.

words with /ɛː/	bèicear, e, gnè, mè(ilich), mèinn, mèirleach, sèimh, sgèimh, snèip, stèisean
words with /oː/	bò, cò, còig, Eòghann, fòn, leòbag, mò, mòr, ò, òbh òbh, Tòmas and -obhl/òbhl-, -oghn/òghn- clusters e.g. gòbhlach, fòghnaidh, ròghnadh

Note that this applies to inflected forms too, so bèicear, bhèicear, bèiceir etc. I didn't list those because it would just make the table messy.

There is some variation between dialects but by and large that's it, learn those few words and you'll never be confused again by the lack of an acute!

Incidentally, because this comes up now and then, the reason the Faclair Beag retains the acutes is not because we're on some mission to resurrect the acute BUT we know a lot of learners use the dictionary and using the acute just makes it easier for them to quickly identify whether it's one or the other.