Re: Silent E

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>
> En r=E9ponse =E0 Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>:
>
<snip my eclipsis stuff>

> > So, there's a good reason behind the extra consonants staying there.
> >
>
> Yep. They add the letter that shows the new sound, but they keep the
> letter before eclipsis so that you can still recognize which word
> you're talking about. I find that neat, and it makes words easier to
> recognize than in Welsh or Breton.
Without a doubt. It's one of the things I prefer about Irish orthography compared to
that of the Brythonic languages.

> > Now for Lenition.
<snip>

> The only difficult thing is that the digraphs that it makes have usually
> different values for foreigner eyes. For instance, the 'th' will evocate
> a /T/ for English people, while it's a /h/ in Irish. And I'm not talking
> about 'dh' and 'ch' :) . The system itself is simple, but unusual, and
> it throws back off foreigners
That's why I think it's a pity the lenition dot has fallen out of use. Of course,
that'd mean that it'd be impossible to write Irish using Latin-1.

<snipping Christophe's excellent explaination of broad and slender vowels>

I'd like to add one little caveat. Where I'm from (Sligo), `How are you?' is `Cad
e mar ata tu?' (accents not marked) (roughly `How is it that you are?', if
anybody's interested). The caveat is in the first two words, `Cad e'. It's
pronounced /CAdj e:/.

K.

--
Keith Gaughan                         In the land of the blind, the
kmgaughan@eircom.net                    one-eyed man is a heretic
http://www.geocities.com/keithgaughan/ [Temporarily]

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