Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

Carsten Becker wrote:

>On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 18:37:17 +0000, Joe <joe@...> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Carsten Becker wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Hey!
>>>
>>>Yesterday, we talked about the "Gaeltacht" and the Irish
>>>language, which is according to our teacher "very difficult
>>>to learn as for pronounciation. Imagine, every consonant
>>>letter exists twice in pronounciation, there's a so-called
>>>slender and a broad version. The grammar is a good deal
>>>different as well, but still there are people who want to
>>>learn this language" (Obligatory question: "Why?").
>>>
>>>
>>Well, because it's dying.  Dying languages desperately need learners.
>>
>>The pronunciation isn't hard as long as you unlearn things.  Unlearning
>>is the most useful skill for language, I guess.  'Slender' means
>>palatalised, and 'broad' velarised, as a rule.  Welsh is easier, though.
>>Once you've got the grammar of Welsh, you're well on the way to Irish.
>>
>>
>
>Lol, no, no! You misunderstood that bit. My teacher pointed out that
>question to us in class. And the broad and slender bits have been nicely
>explained already.
>
>
Yes.  But the spellings are less evil than English.  At least they're
regular.  You can generally tell how something is going to sound from
its spelling. But you have to ignore the values of the letters.

'Dia dhuit'

d is slender, and therefore palatal [dZ]-ish.  It's followed by an a.
'dh' is broad ([G]), and 't' is slender.  Easy.   As long as you pretend
it's not written in the same alphabet.