Am 28.01.2016 um 09:22 schrieb Thomas de Groot:
> On 28-1-2016 1:24, clipka wrote:
>> Am 28.01.2016 um 00:48 schrieb Jim Henderson:
>>
>>>> The part where you missed out what your cat is called. :P
>>>
>>> Ah - the two in question are Fynn (most people don't have a problem with
>>> that) and Eiyrt (which proves a lot more challenging for most - one vet
>>> tech was so pleased she had it right that we didn't have the heart to
>>> tell her she was actually saying it wrong.)
>>
>> I'd try "Finn" and "Art", hoping that -- as seems to be so often the
>> case with Gaelic names -- it's not so much the pronunciation but just
>> the orthography that's weird. Such as "Sean" for what is essentially
>> "John".
> 
> I have long time wondered: why the weird orthography?

One reason is that the Gaelic language distinguishes various pairs of
consonant phonemes that in other Western European languages are mostly
allophones (i.e. different variations of one and the same phoneme, such
as the "p" in "pop" vs. "pip"), and for which consequently the latin
script provides only one symbol each.

When the Gaelic people adopted the Latin script for writing, instead of
introducing diacritical marks to distinguish those consonant variants,
they instead co-opted the vowel symbols for this use.

Thus, the "e" in "Sean", even though being a latin vowel symbol,
doesn't represent a vowel at all, and rather identifies the "s" as being
the variant that in Gaelic would normally be associated with an "e"
vowel (which happens to be similar to the English "sh") rather than that
normally associated with the "a" vowel actually spoken (which would be a
regular "s" sound).

("s" is actually one of the very few cases where the Gaelic pairs of
phonemes aren't allophones in English.)

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