This little cheat sheet is written for the person who would like to know more about the song they are learning and may be struggling to find the words in the dictionary. The Irish language has some grammatical rules that change the spelling in ways unfamiliar to the English speaker. We all know in English we look up a "root word" in the dictionary and apply the prefixes, suffixes, and verbal endings to understand the full meaning of the word. This guide is meant to allow you to at least make a good guess at what the "root word" might be so that you can look that up even if you don't even know what part of speech or context the word is.
"d, g, h, b, bh m t n" are often added to the beginning of a word sometimes with an apostrophe or dash or before a capitalized consonant.
An "h" is frequently the second letter of a word added for grammatical reasons.
Plurals: Unfortunately, the Irish don't just add an "s" to form a plural. There is a list of possible endings: -(a)igh, - a, -e, -(e)anna, -ta, -te, -tha, -the, -(a)í, -(e)adh, (e)acha, -lte, -lne. In other words, if you find the beginning part of the word in question in the dictionary, but there seem to be additional letters that you can't find, you may be looking at a plural noun.
Common verb endings:
-f(a)idh, -f(a)imid, -f(e)ar, -f(a)inn, -f(e)adh
" m' " is the abbreviation of "mo" or my in English. " d' " is "do" or your in English.
"is" is often the abbreviation for "agus" or and in English. "is" is also a be verb.