Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

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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