Re: Hello to you all!

On Sat, 16 Mar 2002 19:50:42 -0800
Aquamarine Demon <aquamarine_demon@...> wrote:

> >>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.<<
>
> Hehe.... that's good. :)

Yep it's not so bad. I started a new job today, and there was an english
guy there who kept on saying "bo'rd gais" (the name of the state gas
company) like "gosh", which is annoyingly halfright. I kept on wanting
to correct his lack of palatalisation, but I though I'd wait 'till I
get to know him better ;).


> >>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.
> (snip)<<
>
> I don't really like the looks of the Cyrillic alphabet.

I like its design - it's suitedness to russian, but looking at a printed page
of Cyrillic makes me think of how a native reader of a lang with an arabic
script would percieve a text in the latin alphabet - real blocky. Still, it
exerts a kind of appeal, and the misleadingly latin-like letters gain my
approval by pleading their Greek origins.


> At any rate, I like the spelling of Irish. It may be illogical and
> ill-fitting, but it's quite aesthetically pleasing, in my opinion.
yipee! acceptance! I am not an orthography masochist!!

stephen

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