The old "Séimhiú "

Yesterday I (re)started my Irish classes - yeah! Even the class is on an advanced stage and I'm an eternal beginner, I asked Ciaran - the múinteoir - if I could just be a fly on the wall. Among several things I missed, I got something... this curio about the origins of the Séimhiú, the "h" after a consonant in the middle of a word, that in Irish generally silences the consonant before it. If found at the start of a word, it is generally pronounced as a "H" instead of the first letter.

The curio is that the original Séimhiú was a "dot" ("a Buailte) over the letter. When typewriters came into fashion in the country, the specialized ones weren’t freely available, and they decided to put the "h" after the letter instead!