What Bill says.

Incidentally, the dot over a consonant to soften it was a shorthand adopted in the 18th century by the poets who had been thrown on to farmwork by the loss of their aristocratic Gaelic patrons. After work they'd go back to the bothy where the farmhands worked, and write by rushlight, copying out by memory their own compositions and also the traditional stories, songs and poems that had been in the oral tradition, sometimes for many hundreds of years. They formed a kind of shorthand of which only the buailte - the dot over the consonant - survived.

Hey, Pavane seems to have disappeared once I made the offer. Weird! My Irish isn't *that* bad!