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Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

From:Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 2, 2005, 12:46
Carsten Becker wrote:

> 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"
That sounds like a bit of a comicbook description of the language. ;-) However, it reminds me of one time a friend of mine from Stuttgart was over here and was trying to get me to pronounce "Spätlese" properly. I kept on falling down on the _ä_ for some reason...
> We had to do the first three sheets in groupwork and had all > very much fun, however, trying to figure out pronounciation > and playing the scenes out in front of the class. Some of > us said it'd sound remotedly like French or somesuch, but I > think since nobody of us knew how to pronounce Irish, we > all read said it in a rather harsh voice, which reminded me > *personally* sometimes rather of Klingon mixed with > Japanese actually. At least our English teacher seemed to > know how to pronounce the dialogue of the last sheet.
Tell them you were talking to an Irish guy online and he said to pronounce it _softly_. The best characterisation I heard of the sound of the language was one that described it as both soft and hard at the same time. I wish I could remember exactly how it went but my memory fails me. K.

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Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>