Blair Collection > Celtic magazine > Volume 12

Gaelic Orthography. 519
Gaelic language with a surprising degree of correctness. There
are a few sounds in Gaelic which are generally regarded as un-
pronounceable by an Englishman. One of the worst of these is
the double sound of /, as in "la," a day ; and the word " laogh,"
a calf, is usually put forward as a perfect settler, as it, in addition
to this double / sound, contains other two posers, namely, ao and
gh. But, in point of fact, the word need present no more diffi-
culty to a courageous Saxon than the harmless animal with which
it is identified. In fact, its final sound, that of gh — the one
usually considered the least in point of difficulty — is the one most
difficult to convey to an Englishman, unless, indeed, we simply
tell him to regard it as the rr of the Newcastle burr. The sound
of the initial /in "laogh" is one that English speakers pronounce
every day without knowing it. It is a combination of / and the
th in the English word " that." Place the tongue in the position
for /, and, while pronouncing that letter, slip the tip of the tongue
down to the points of the teeth as if for th, and you have the exact
sound of the Gaelic / in "laogh," and // in "call," "null," and,
in fact, wherever // is preceded by a broad vowel. Indeed, a
more simple instruction might be to place the tongue as for th
{dh), and sound /. The broad sound of n {nn) is to be treated in
an exactly similar way. It is a combination of n and th, {dh). The
sound oi ao in "laogh" is, as it is invariably elsewhere, long, and
is the same as the cen of the French, or the u of the English word
" purr," lengthened out.
A peculiar philological fact with reference to // and Jin is that
in old Gaelic they are very frequently Id and 7id. The change of
this d into dh gives at once the combined sounds Ith and nth, to
which I have been referring.
Before going further I may mention one or two defects in our
Gaelic orthography. These are the want of a symbol to distin-
guish the various sounds of the letters / and n. To a person who
understands the language the matter presents no great difficulty,
but to a beginner in Gaelic reading they are a little perplexing,
there being nothing necessarily in their proximity to certain
vowels, to indicate their sound, as in the case of the other con-
sonants. We require also a symbol to denote the indefinite short
unaccented sound of the vowels — the sound of a in " cionta," e in