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se glacaḋ, walk," spaisdeóraċt being a word universally known and used.
Of these three possible courses, I did not follow the first for various reasons, of which one was all-sufficient, namely, that my acquaintance with the proper inflections of the ancient language, as read by the light of science and philology, is much too slender. Neither have I adopted the second course. To have done so would have been to produce an appalling mixture, absolutely unintelligible to the general student of the language, who has no acquaintance with it as spoken, and probably (since most of these tales come from Central Connacht) unintelligible to even Irish-speakers of the other provinces. I have accordingly adopted the third and only other possible method. I may say that I have not changed a word, or, at the most, have merely substituted Irish words for English ones in two or three places, while I have been most careful to avoid grammatical errors as far as possible, and to give to all words their proper written case-endings and inflections.
I must explain, by a few instances, what it is I mean by grammatical errors. I have heard, for example, a person say an't-inġean, making inġean a masculine word, which it is not, for all over the country the best speakers make it feminine an inġean; and so, even where the narrator may have said an't-inġean, I have invariably given it its right gender, and so with all other words, in the few instances in which I have found the wrong genders given. Again, in Connacht we never pronounce the f of the future and conditional tenses, or the iḃ in the Dat. Plural of nouns; but I have not, on that account, ventured to depart from the universally received orthography. Again, people say indifferently tá me buiḋeaċ leat and díot, but as de is the pronoun used in the best books and MSS., and by the Irish
