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Introduction
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RO-RÀDH - INTRODUCTION Many people take one look at Gaelic or listen to it on the radio and go "bloody hell, how are you supposed to pronounce that?" Admittedly, it does appear to boast a profusion of h's, silent vowels and strange sounds you don't get in English. But then again, the whole point about languages is that they are different from one another - why should Gaelic be anything else? English has over 10 different vowel sounds, a nightmare for Spanish speakers who have only 5, Cantonese has 7 different tones to distinguish words, Russian none, Mandarin uses over 10.000 characters to write, Rotokas needs only 11 letters ... the list is long and varied. And somewere in amongst all of these Gaelic sits, with it's 18 letters and 29 or so consonants and 18 vowels. Even though it may seem completely nuts to begin with, Gaelic orthography is actually a lot more phonemic than English, that is, there is a more regular and direct correlation between the letters and the way you say a word. All you need to do is understand the way Gaelic spelling works. Fine, you might say, so where do the vowels in caoineadh go because you can only hear 2 1/2 ...? The answer to this can be found in medieval Ireland. Ogham writing never caught on much except for writing on huge stone slabs, which were great for proclaiming victory for the “three sons of Maolain” but would have needed some adaption to write on parchment. But since the first people to write on parchment in Ireland were monks, they didn't have much to do with Ogham on the one hand and already knew a writing system adapted to writing on parchment - Latin. Only it seemed there weren't enough letters (18 or so) to accommodate for all these sounds (over 50 in Common Gaelic). The problem was that Common Gaelic had two variants of every consonant - and this distinction was important because it changed the meaning of words. Linguists talk about "velarised" and "palatalised" consonants, Celticists about "broad" and "slender" consonants - what both mean is that e.g. l can be pronounced in two ways - way back in your mouth like in càil or way forward as in càl. The only difference between these two words is in the way the consonant is pronounced. And Common Gaelic had 22 (x2) of these ... and only 18 letters to write them with. Seemingly hopeless task. But then these monks came up with an ingenious solution. They noticed that often the nature of a consonant was determined by the vowels surrounding it. The slender consonants seemed to group with e and i vowels, the broad ones with a, o and u. So they turned this into a rule - saying that a consonant flanked by slender vowels would have the slender value and vice versa. It took several centuries in fact for Gaelic spelling to fully adhere to this rule - but by the time the Gaelic Bible was written, it was "caol ri caol agus leathann ri leathann" for everyone. Meaning? Well, in Old Irish documents you will find words like tairmesca which don't fully follow this rule ... only later was the "silent" a stuck in to comply fully with this rule, giving us the familiar toirmeasg. But that is basically what is behind Gaelic spelling - vowels telling you how to pronounce the consonants. All you have to do is learn which one's are "really there" and which one's are just giving cues to pronounciation. We hope that you will find Fuaimean na Gàidhlig helpful to overcome not only the Blas na Beurla but also the fear of Gaelic spelling. Beir buaidh! |
