Why the difference of pinc and phinc?
As we have already seen, the majority of Gaelic adjectives follow the noun. We know that Gaelic nouns are divided into feminine and masculine nouns. It’s important to distinguish these from female and male nouns! It does not refer to the gender of an animal or a person.
The adjectives following feminine nouns lenite if they can. Lenition means softening and it often means a change in the spelling of a word, by adding an ‘h’ after the first consonant.
What letters take lenition when you spell them?
B, C, D, F, G, H, M, P, S, T
What letters never lenite?
Vowels never lenite. The letters d, t and s don’t usually lenite if the word before them ends in an n, and words beginning with sg, sm, sp and st never lenite.
What about adjectives of plural nouns?
The adjectives following plurals of nouns take a suffix of a if they can.
mòr
big
mòra
big
beag
small
beaga
small
dubh
black
dubha
black