A chara, - Irish is not uniquely complicated among the languages of Europe. The Christian Brothers' Grammar gives Irish nouns three cases: vocative, genitive and the common form. Hungarian has 25 cases; surely, more than Irish, it cries out for an axe to be laid to its grammar.
Initial mutation in Irish is used to distinguish gender, possession, vocative and plural; it has developed because the speakers of Irish found a need for it. The initial mutations can be difficult to learn, but, with a little application and some enthusiasm, it can be done. They are, after all, entirely natural sounds made with the tongue and lips, not advanced techniques in brain surgery. A cóta, her coat; a gcóta, their coat: where is the problem?
Esperanto was designed to be so simple and so devoid of grammatical complexity and initial mutations that it could be adopted as a universal language. For all its many virtues, it did not become the world's lingua franca; a much more difficult language, English, did. Languages do not flourish because they are easy or decline because they are hard; if that were the case, the positions of English and Esperanto would be reversed.
Real languages have dialect baggage, linguistic quirks, peculiarities and infuriating idioms. They have history. The dialects, idiosyncrasies and initial mutations of Irish add to its richness and expressive subtlety, part of that interesting eccentricity that every language possesses and that attracts people to learn it. Why should anyone bother to learn a dumbed-down, bargain-basement Irish-lite?
Enthuse people to learn the language; stress its strengths and attractions, rather than reduce it to the lowest common denominator.
Irish language learners should be taught some basic phonetics to let them know that aspirations and eclipses are not arbitrary marks plucked out of thin air and plonked before random letters, but a written means of showing natural sound change. As someone ought to have said, "Deireadh teanga a simpliú". - Is mise,
TOM Ó CLÉIRIGH, Donegore Drive, Antrim, Co Antrim.