Exceptions

[lysana]

In an amusing follow-on to the drama surrounding my attempts to acquire Teach Yourself Irish, it turned out the next morning that the nice indy bookstore was confusing it with an Irish conversation course. Once it was made clear we wanted TYI, they found a copy on their shelves and held it for us. We bought it, and I've started looking over the

Comments

[lrc]

There's a joke in there about your aspirations to learn gaelic pronunciation.

[merle_]

I tried learning both Irish and Scottish Gaelic at various points, and had similar problems. Possibly it stems from written language being rarer, and less consistent, back then? Or from the attempt to transliterate the language into an alphabet with a less discrete number of phonemes. I always loved the "oh, these six consonants next to each other? they're silent in this position, otherwise they sound like 'J'" sort of rules.

[lysana]

The issue that plagues modern English speakers when trying to wrap their brains around the phonetics of Irish and Scots Gaelic boils down to this. The language took the origins of its written form when monks whose primary if not sole written literacy was in late Latin came in and decided to start writing the language down. They set the foundations. The method of writing each language drifted over the centuries, finally reaching its current form when standardization was introduced in the 1940's. That act both made it easier and harder, as they dropped the usage of a dot over a lenited letter in favor of adding an H instead.

[merle_]

Huh. Very interesting, and makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

(still doesn't make it an easier language to learn because such shifts can occur in many directions, but *shrug*)

[ardaniel]

Not every lenited sound in Gàidhlig is explicitly spelled out, either. Some of them you just have to recognize, just like you have to intuit where the "helper vowel" is in some words...

[lastwaykeeper]

S'why I love IPA :P

[technoshaman]

Roman orthography for a non-Latinate language is the surest way to send an English speaker into mental tailspins.

*nods* Especially inconsistient orthography. Mandarin ain't much better.

[ardaniel]

The thing I love most about Scottish Gaelic, in a masochistic way, is the shiny brochure that gets issued every few years that revises most of the spelling rules.

The current edition of Teach Yourself Gaelic is out of date now, thanks to such innovations, and I'm constantly stumbling over articles in Gaelic magazines that have words I *should* recognize, but whose orthography has just come to pieces compared to what I learned.

As I say to my teacher every so often, "This language needs to steal some fucking consonants."

[technoshaman]

Bloody Welshmen faked off with'em.... :)

[redbird]

Roman orthography for a non-Latinate language is the surest way to send an English speaker into mental tailspins.

Roman orthography for a non-Latinate language is what this entire conversation is taking place in, of course. I wonder whether Irish orthography would be more or less frustrating for a native speaker of a Latinate language such as Spanish. Or, from the other angle, a native speaker of a language that isn't written with the Latin alphabet, who might have fewer expectations.

[lysana]

You make a valid point about the orthography. :)

I think someone who isn't used to Roman orthography would find Irish less of a challenge in that zone, yes. I can see based on my remnant knowledge of French that a French speaker would see different challenges in Irish than an English speaker.

I wish I could remember the name of a video I saw on YouTube that actually brushes against this thought. It's the story of a gentleman in China who decides to move to Ireland and becomes fluent in Irish without knowing a word of English.