User talk:Caoimhin ceallach/alt Appendix:Old Irish glossary

Aspiration

Our existing Old Irish infrastructure doesn't use the word "aspiration" at all, as far as I know. Your definition is identical to your definition of lenition, but you say we use +H to mark it. In fact, +H is used to mark h-prothesis (which annoyingly is not reliably shown in Old Irish orthography, since h often appears where there is no h-prothesis and is often absent where there is). If we list aspiration in the glossary at all, we should just say it's a synonym for lenition found in some other resources. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:27, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

That was supposed be my entry for h-prothesis. "Aspiration" is what Stifter calls it in Sengoídelc. A downside is that it might be confused with Welsh aspiration. Pederson uses the term "sandhi-h". McCone's Old Irish grammar and reader uses "h-prefix". GOI uses "gemination", but we should definitely not use that. Is "h-prothesis" what we prefer? —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 13:42, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Well, we call it h-prothesis for modern Irish and Welsh, so it would be nice to be consistent. Aspiration is a very unfortunate name for it since it isn't aspiration in the phonological sense (neither is the Welsh aspirate mutation, for that matter) and because "aspiration" is sometimes used to refer to lenition (more so for modern Irish than Old Irish, though). "h-prefix" is problematic because it isn't a prefix in the morphological sense. —Mahāgaja · talk 13:57, 10 April 2024 (UTC)