[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Milesian

I'm not sure why Ó Siadhail says that.
Standard Irish is what's taught in Irish schools.
It is heavily based on the Munster dialect (southern) yet it is somewhat artificial. It is not a historic dialect spoken by people in the Gaeltachtai, but it is a standard by which everyone can understand each other - in theory

You should see the artificiality of standardized Basque (Batua).

The various dialects were either mutually unintelligible or hard to understand from one to another. Basque being a Paleolithic language, it lacked many words and not just fairly modern ones. The Basque philosopher don Miguel de Unamuno noticed this when he argued that Castilian was the language spoken by the Basque people, because "the Basque language falls short for us to express our ideas". It is safe to assume here that he also meant that the Castilian language was in fact, in its origins, the vulgar Romance language spoken by Basques, attested by the heavy loans that it had from the speak of the Basques which makes it unlike other Romance languages (save the Occitan Gascon language).

One fun account is the adoption of a word for 'airport' in Basque. The logical thing to do would have been to translate "air" and "port". In Basque, "air" is haizea and "port" is kaia. But the pronounciation of haizea kaia in Basque sounds like in Castilian ahí se caía, which means "there it fell down" (or "there it crashed").

Therefore they opted out for the basquicized Latin word aeroportua!

(note of discharge: I cannot assure that this is not a urban legend)