IT was interesting to read Isabelle Gow’s letter (July 19) about just passing her Higher Gaelic exams. Well done Isabelle and her classmates. Thought you would enjoy this 90th birthday picture of my husband with its Gaelic inscription. Still studying Gaelic at 90, David was a bit shy to send this in but I thought your readers might be interested.
Joyce Hilton
via email
GAELIC is undeniably a difficult language to master, as Mr Charlie Kerr points out (Letters, July 24); but it is hardly reasonable of him to complain that the relationship of spelling to pronunciation in Gaelic is at first unfamiliar to native English-speakers. The Roman alphabet is a flexible tool, and languages with vastly different pronunciation systems adapt it in their own individual ways.
The rules of Gaelic orthography are actually much more consistent than those of English, which also present major difficulties to learners; and has Mr Kerr ever tried French? If he remembers his primary school class singing something that sounded like “vermee oh”, I remember how some of my own primary contemporaries were able to say “Mercy bokoo”! There is no “normal” in the sound-values of letters or combinations of letters: each language has its own conventions, with which learners simply have to cope.
READ MORE: Wee Ginger Dug: Why EVERY Scot has a part to play if Gaelic is to be saved
Mr Kerr also needs to look more closely at the linguistic history of Scotland. There was no “one time” when all the five languages he cites were used. French was the language of the court only under the last kings of the old Celtic royal line: the Stewart court was Scots-speaking. Latin, of course, ceased to be the language of the Church with the Reformation. And both the accession of the Stewarts and the Reformation happened well before English (as opposed to Scots) came to be commonly used in the Lowlands: that only began in the seventeenth century.
Derrick McClure
Aberdeen
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