Re: Hello to you all!

From: David Starner [mailto:starner@OKSTATE.EDU]

> On Sun, Mar 10, 2002 at 11:15:40AM -0800, Aquamarine Demon wrote:
> > I, as a proud Irish-American, do find the plight of Irish
> Gaelic very sad.
> > I've made it my mission for a long time now to learn the
> language, but I
> > haven't been able to yet, unfortunately.
>
> Gaelic was a language I considered learning, up until I bought my copy
> of the Handbook of the IPA. Did they have to make up some of those
> symbols just for Gaelic? I can live with learning new sounds, but
> Irish has two p phonemes, 3  phonemes, and so on, moving it off my "to
> learn just because" list.
No, things aren't quite *that* bad! Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic all
have what are called palatal consonants, as does Russian and I'm sure
some other Slavic languages two. I'll give an example. In my dialect of
Irish, a unpalatalised d is /d[/ (dental voiced stop) whereas the
palatalised version is /dZ/, the first letter in the word `jam'. None
of the other consonants are all that hard either, and take it from me,
it's not as bad as it seems. In fact, the only reason why Gaelic looks
so daunting is that the latin alphabet is so ill-adept to handling
it - Cyrillic does a much better job.

I wonder how those Cyrillic-for-Gaelic projects are all going?