The Irish blogosphere has arranged crunch meetings in Dublin, Cork and Galway to urgently research the spelling of words in Irish, after the election of Micheál Martin to the leadership of Fianna Fáil.
Leader of the Irish Bloggers Federation, Stiofan Mac An Dulligh, explained the predicament.
“Up to now, whilst we have known there was a thing over some of the vowels in some words, we had always assumed there was a typo, or it was some sort of poetic device. For instance, the Spanish have what looks like a slice of bacon over their ‘n’ sometimes, but I’m sure most Spanish people don’t know what that does.”
Blogger RedEamo, a supporter of the Labour party, agreed.
“Many of us just aren’t familiar with foreign languages. I mean, I try to use the French acute on words where I think it’s justified. It doesn’t modify the speech at all. Sometimes, as in the case of Míchéál Mártín or Éámón Gílmóré, I just use the acute on all of them, because I don’t want to upset speakers of Éiréánnách in the Gailtachtanna. We’re sensitive to that in the Labour party.”
Ruth Ní Eidhin, leader of the ‘Teanga nó Bás’ group, said she was mad as hell and not going to take it any more.
“Seriously. The key to modify a vowel is right alt on a PC keyboard, and on a mac, hold in the Option key and E, then press the vowel. Please don’t try to put a fáda on a consonant.”
Teanga nó Bás said that if people did not comply, they would confiscate the letter V, and replace H with a dot before the preceding consonant.
“That should make the election posters a challenge for the bastards”, said Ní Eidhin.
