Irish is the hard!

Being a nerd* for languages, I felt that I should brush up on Irish Gaelic, or Irish as the locals call it, in preparation for my business trip to Dublin. It’s not that I really need to know it, but it’s a rare opportunity to take something I’ve always wanted to learn, and put it into practice for a few days. And despite what I originally thought, Irish Gaelic is far from a dead language. For example in the northwestern area of Gaeltacht and other pockets. Ireland technically is a bi-lingual place, so Gaelic signs (with English) are all over the place.

The catch is that Gaelic is really pretty tough. Gaelic pretty much uses the Roman alphabet like English, but the letters are all pronounced very different than what an English speaker would expect. Also, the rules for pronunciation are complex. For example, guess how leabhair (books) is pronounced? It’s actually pretty easy: lee-yow-eer, or something like it. The key is knowing how to read the words. In my research, I read how Gaelic is a language that is still evolving from an older form, so a lot of spellings are counter-intuitive because they reflect an older way to pronounce things, but the modern pronunciation is different.

Here’s some general advice:

  • The letters ‘o’ and ‘u’ are basically the same and sound like ‘u’ in ‘pull’.
  • The letter á sounds like the English word ‘law’ not ‘top’, as in short ‘a’.
  • The letter ‘ao’ is more like ‘ee’ or sometimes ‘wee’, so gaoth (wind) sounds like ‘gweeh’. This one is not obvious, so take note!
  • On that note, the ‘th’ sound really is just a strong ‘H’…this is a prime example of a sound evolving in a language. The ‘th’ used to be different.
  • The ‘e’ in the beginning of a word is silent. Other times, as in ‘ea’ it behaves like a ‘y’. So neach (one, person), sounds more like ‘nyahk’.
  • Remember the ‘ch’ is kind of throaty..just like in German.
  • The ‘dh’, ‘fh’ and ‘gh’ are silent.
  • Meanwhile, the ‘bh’ and ‘mh’ are more like ‘w’, or sometimes ‘v’.

So knowing some of this, you can look at a word like maoin (wealth) and know that it’s pronounced like “mween”. The prime minister is called Taoiseach, which based on the rules above sounds like “tee-shyak”.

A big thanks goes to Fios Feasa, which has a really comprehensive explanation of the language and tons of cool sound clips. Whoever they hired to read the words has a really cool voice. Irish accents in general sound cool. To really make use of this site, you should definitely have sound enabled and try every sound clip until Gaelic pronunciation becomes second nature. The grammar rules themselves oftentimes are just too hard to remember, but if you hear it enough, you just remember how to read something. :)

Another helpful site, which provides a very helpful summary of pronunciation comes from the University of Tennessee: http://www.utm.edu/departments/english/everett/496pron.htm. This one is amusing because it shows examples of Gaelic that defy even their own rules, such as Rudraige (Rury) or Laoghaire (Leary). The word Siobhan by the way, sounds kind of like “shivan”.

Lastly, this young lady gives a nice introduction to Gaelic greetings on YouTube.

* – The title is in another language, l33tspeak, which also sounds great in Buddhist sutras. ;)


Be the first to like this post.

One Comment on “Irish is the hard!”

  1. TS says:

    It’s an interesting language, even though spoken daily by only about half a million people, some of whom only do so at at school. The Gaeltacht areas are still Irish-speaking and the whole of the country is officially bilingual, though you will hear much more English than Irish in cities like Dublin and Cork.


Leave a Reply

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo
Twitter picture

You are commenting using your
Twitter account. (Log Out)

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your
Facebook account. (Log Out)

Connecting to %s