Christmas

[dianefairhall]

Very funny! Scottish Gaelic isn't always as bad as it looks because half the letters are silent. Then there are words like suiteas. Guess what? Sweeties! Stornoway is Stèornobhàgh which is easy once you know that bh has a sound between a v and a w, letters that don't exist in the Gaidhlig alphabet.

 

[LadyA]

Very funny! Scottish Gaelic isn't always as bad as it looks because half the letters are silent. Then there are words like suiteas. Guess what? Sweeties! Stornoway is Stèornobhàgh which is easy once you know that bh has a sound between a v and a w, letters that don't exist in the Gaidhlig alphabet.

That's very similar to Irish Gaelic then. W sounds are made by putting a "h" after either m or b. Except, in the old Gaelic alphabet, we didn't have a "h" either! So it was done by putting a dot over the previous letter.

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[Margaid]

Sottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Manx are one branch of the Celtic languages; Welsh, Cornish and Breton are the other.

 

[LadyA]

Sottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Manx are one branch of the Celtic languages; Welsh, Cornish and Breton are the other.

Yep.
And there are different dialects in each, I assume?

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[Margaid]

I only know about Welsh and there is a difference in accent as you move through the counties with the old county of Cardigan probalby being the most different. There are some different words used in the north compared with the south. South word for milk is llaeth and north is llefrith, and the word for now is nawr or rwan - there are lots of others but I can't remember them offhand.

 

[dianefairhall]

I only know about Welsh and there is a difference in accent as you move through the counties with the old county of Cardigan probalby being the most different. There are some different words used in the north compared with the south. South word for milk is llaeth and north is llefrith, and the word for now is nawr or rwan - there are lots of others but I can't remember them offhand.

I think it's similar with Scottish Gaelic but I think it's more a difference in pronunciation rather than different words. For instance, the pronoun sibh (= you, plural or respectful) is usually pronounced sheeve but in the Western Isles pronounced shoo. All very fascinating.

 

[bigyetiman]

Very educational this forum. We have a friend from Yorkshire who when he moved down South was fascinated by Cockney rhyming slang. he was convinced we were making it up as we went along.
For a small country we have an amazing array of accents as well, from estuary English (ghastly) to just about 20 miles further north into Essex you get a country burr, then hop into Suffolk and a completely different country accent

 

[LadyA]

I only know about Welsh and there is a difference in accent as you move through the counties with the old county of Cardigan probalby being the most different. There are some different words used in the north compared with the south. South word for milk is llaeth and north is llefrith, and the word for now is nawr or rwan - there are lots of others but I can't remember them offhand.

I think it's similar with Scottish Gaelic but I think it's more a difference in pronunciation rather than different words. For instance, the pronoun sibh (= you, plural or respectful) is usually pronounced sheeve but in the Western Isles pronounced shoo. All very fascinating.

Yes, that's the way it is with Irish Gaelic. Different regions have different pronounciations. I suppose it's a bit like regional accents? When I was a child, Irish people had such very distinct regional accents. I could have even told which area of our local small city someone was from, by their distinctive accents. Not now though. I think tv has had a huge influence on accent.

 

[dinosaw]

I think TV has played a huge part, as has peoples mobility, in softening accents around the world. I know that you now very rarely hear people in the North East speaking like my grandparents did, or like the comedian Bobby Thompson who spoke Pitmatic, which meant he only had an audience in the North East of England. He was old enough, and Pitmatic is different enough from Geordie, that I struggled to understand him when I was a kid. His Pitmatic was different from Northumbrian even though there was a shared mining heritage. There was a time when someone from Newcastle going out in Sunderland or vice versa had to watch how loudly they spoke as it was so very obvious where you came from, I don't know if that is the case now.

I think Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) is lovely sounding language whether you understand the words or not, I really like listening to the early stuff from Clannad and think Julie Fowlis is great too.

 

[Margaid]

Very educational this forum. We have a friend from Yorkshire who when he moved down South was fascinated by Cockney rhyming slang. he was convinced we were making it up as we went along.
For a small country we have an amazing array of accents as well, from estuary English (ghastly) to just about 20 miles further north into Essex you get a country burr, then hop into Suffolk and a completely different country accent

Also sometimes the "town" accent is different from the surrounding more rural areas. I used to live in Suffolk and the Ipswich accent was quite different from that in the villages a few miles to the north. The same is true of Cardiff and the much softer accent as you move away from the city.
The accent/dialect between East Suffolk (where we lived) and West Suffolk was also quote different.

 

[dinosaw]

Also sometimes the "town" accent is different from the surrounding more rural areas. I used to live in Suffolk and the Ipswich accent was quite different from that in the villages a few miles to the north. The same is true of Cardiff and the much softer accent as you move away from the city.
The accent/dialect between East Suffolk (where we lived) and West Suffolk was also quote different.

That's the case with Leicester and Northampton too, county people have much slower rounder speech. Though in Northampton the town itself has two accents, a sort of cockney and the original Northampton accent. In the 60's they moved people up from the slum clearances in London into what they called the eastern district which makes up almost half the town. Corby has a funny pseudo Scottish accent due to the huge amount of people who moved down from the Clyde when the steelworks began to close up there.

 

[bigyetiman]

At one time Tilbury had a lot of Irish accents as people came over to work at the docks, and girls to work at the seaman's hospitals. Then a lot of cockney accents around as people were moved out of London onto new housing estates. Now the predominant accent around Thurrock is Eastern European