There's also the imput of Norman French into Irish - seomra comes from chaumbre, Seán from Jehan, srl.
I did once draw up a list of Irish words which I thought would probably come from NF at the other place, I think it was. Though it can be a bit misleading sometimes as some words come directly from Latin, but give the impression that their origin might be French. There's plámás which is said to come from blancmange(r) as it apparently was something to boast about. Welsh also has quite a few Norman French words such as ffenestr. I've also heard it said that Scots Gaelic has been influenced by the use of French at court by Mary Queen of Scots and Marie de Guise and their courtiers - for instance the plural you - 'sibh' is used as a polite form of address in the same way as 'vous' is used in French, which you obviously don't find in Irish. Scots has also been influenced by French - ashet comes from assiette for example.

Knowing the origin of the days might also help students not to put Dé in front of Déardaoin as many do.

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http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaeilge/gaeilge.html, Books by Holger Pedersen(A Celtic Grammar comparison), Dr. Hermann Ebel .
the web address I have posted you is invaluable as it is better than any site in Ireland on the topics covered on the Irish language.
I have downloaded numerous books on OLd Irish and moden Irish books from this site.
WWW.archive.org : www.openlibrary.net : www.booksos.org are the best free sources of materials.
Have a look at Celtic Review, Revue Celtique, Zeitschrift fur Philologie Celtische.
really what you need to do is study Old Irish and that will give you a really good opening .
I am a native speaker from Conamara and learning Old Irish and the stuff from over 1,000 years ago is still relevant
The best experts on the Old Irish were/are Germans,Austrians, Swiss
The head man in OLd Irish in Maynooth is Dr David Stifter , a German speaker and taught in Vienna for years but has
filled Kim McCone's position in Maynooth.
Read works by Kim McCone an expert on linguistics and Celtic languages.
this should be enough for you to get cracking.

apology for error in previous post

http://archive.org/stream/bibliographyo ... 0/mode/2up

this is the link which points you to etymology of the Irish language

As Lughaidh says, there is no "why", it just is. But the interesting thing is how the same patterns repeat in different language families. (The most common patterns are listed on Wikipedia.)

The Romance languages (those that came from Latin) tend to show increasing lenition the further west you go from Italy, and lenition is one of the big differences between the different Polynesian languages (the H of Hawai'i is the result of historical lenition).

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

Be very very careful with old etymological books on archive.org -- the inaccuracies in MacBain are no worse than those in most of his contemporaries' works. This was a time when people were still commonly trying to demonstrate their language as somehow "purer" or "older" than everyone elses -- an era of institutionalised racism building into the eugenics movement. Most etymologies were written by someone with an agenda. Consider that the common literary language of earlier Scottish, Manx and Irish Gaelic communities is called Old Irish, then Middle Irish, then Classical Irish. Not Old, Middle and Classical "Gaelic", but "Irish". The old school of thought saw Manx and Scottish Gaelic as "deviants" rather than recognising that the whole family, including the various dialects in Ireland were all part of the same "divergence".

The main criticism of MacBain is that he makes leaps in logic and includes a lot of conjecture, but there was no real sign of an "agenda" behind this. Criticism of his contemporaries is that they chose unlikely derivations, purely to claim "purity" in the descent of the language.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

This site gives the etymology of some common words:
http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaeilge/donnch ... betic.html

This may be of interest, "Lexique étymologique d'Irlandais ancien":
http://books.dias.ie/index.php?main_pag ... cPath=8_38

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(SL)(GM)