On 28-1-2016 15:19, clipka wrote:
> 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.)
>

Interesting. Thanks!

I go explore from here :-)

-- 
Thomas

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