Prosthetic f, backformation or eagal and feagal

Prosthetic sounds are nothing unusual in the… ah ok, right you are. A prosthetic sound is a "random" sound that gets stuck in front, the middle or at the end of a word to make it conform better with the sound rules of whichever language.

Many languages do this, e.g. Spanish. Spanish phonology (i.e. sound laws) has a rule saying that no word may begin with [sp] [st] or [sk]. But there are words in Spanish which either historically have these initials or loan words coming into Spanish. To get around this problem, Spanish phonology says "prefix [e]" … so Latin spīritus, scola, stabilis become espirito, escuela and estable. Similarly Scandinavia, spot and Stockholm become Escandinavia, espot and Estocolmo …

Backformation means that speakers of a languages take a native or adopted word and re-analyse it as it were. This often happens in loanwords or native words whose meaning has become opaque. Opaque, when a linguist uses the word, means that the meaning is not clear from just looking at the word. For example, you can look at the word drumstick and figure that it's a stick that's used with a drum. But no matter how hard you stare at a hot toddy, chances are you won't figure it comes from a Hindi word for a palm-tree.

Where was I? Ah, backformation. English, for example, adopted the French word for cherries, cerise from Latin ceresia, both mass nouns (as in, no singular). But because English has a very prominent -s plural, English speakers "figured" that the s must obviously be a plural, so if many of those little fruits are cherries, one must obviously be - a cherry. This is called backformation. Gaelic does that too, but because it has this phenomenon of lenition at the beginning of words, unlike English it tends to do that at the beginning of words ...

Now, Gaelic phonology does not forbid words beginning with a vowel (don't laugh, some languages have no words beginning with vowels!) but it does have something like prosthetic sounds. Most notably [f]. In the case of Gaelic this comes about when native speakers re-interpret words beginning with a vowel as "a word which has lenited X". There is more than just one backformations however. Let us have a quick look at what can happen:

[h] ⇨ [t]	because lenited [t] yields [h]
initial vowel ⇨ [f]	because lenited [f] is silent (this is by far the most common one and about the only one still active in modern Gaelic)
initial vowel ⇨ [t], [g] or [d]	this happens in words with a soft onset i.e. an almost [j] sound e.g. in English iota, which to Gaelic ears sounds like the word begins with gh th or dh

There are more, but those are the most common ones.

Examples to your hearts content, a lot of them are loanwords (except the ones beginning with f + vowel):

Source	Meaning	Gaelic	Irish
halberd		taileabart	halbard
hogshead		tocasaid	oigiséid
throng	trang "busy"	trang(láil)
Latin iota	a bit	tiota	giota
Norse hǫll	hall	talla	halla
Old Irish áinne	ring	fàinne	fáinne
	Old Irish allas 'sweat' fallas allas	Old Irish ásaim 'I grow' fàs fás	Old Irish ecla 'fear' (f)eagal eagla	Old Irish ilur 'eagle' (f)iolaire iolar	Old Irish osclaicim 'I open' fosgail oscail	Old Irish rádharc 'vision, view' fradharc radharc	Old Irish uacht 'cold' fuachd fuacht OIr. uath 'hate' fuath fuath OIr. urusa 'easy' furasda furasta Scots haggis taigeis hagaois A particularly bizarre example of this is the Gaelic word for sister ... because it went through this several times: Indo-European swesðr Old Irish siur which lenites to shiur so often (think about it ... mo, do and a (his) all lenite, and you talk about this sort of relationship so much more than you do about 'our sister') it becomes re-analysed as Early Irish fiur/siur (genitive fethar/sethar) which yields modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic deirfiúr 'sister' from dearbh phiuthar 'true sister' and fiúr 'kinswoman' (because two words are better than one …) piuthar - from the old genitive which has now become the nominative for sister and because <f> is obviously lenited … now why didn't you think of that before? ☺ Anyway, to get back to the point ... this is the reason why you will hear some Gaelic speakers pronounce certain words with f and some without ... it is a process that is still in the middle of happening, so until the language decides on whether it will stick with eagal or adopt feagal, you can take your pick about which one you prefer, it really makes no difference either way as both are "good Gaelic words". Beagan gràmair ᚛ Pronunciation - Phonetics - Phonology - Morphology - Tense - Syntax - Corpus - Registers - Dialects - History - Terms and abbreviations ᚜