In reply to G8ADD:
ALL languages are pronounced exactly as
spelled, once you know the rules
I’ve been trying to fathom what you might mean by that, since it seems to me to be self-evidently not true. For a start, not ALL languages have an alphabetic writing system at all, and hence may have no concept of “spelling”, but that is perhaps pedantry.
Most languages with an alphabet have spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling rules of varying degrees of complexity, but few are complete and unambiguous. English certainly isn’t. There are many English words whose pronunciation cannot be inferred from the spelling with any number of rules, simply because there is no way of knowing which of a pair of homographs you have. If you have to say the word “sow”, you cannot do that by rule; you have to know whether you are talking about a pig or putting seeds in the ground. Proper names are worse - you gave one example yourself but there are worse - for example I believe that there are at least four different accepted pronunciations of the English surname Featherstonehaugh. A rule, however complex, could only generate one.
The problem with Gaelic is that it has a rich repertoire of phonemes; something in the region of 50 distinct sounds. The mediaeval scribes who had to write it down on parchment for the first time had a real problem trying to represent it in their meagre Latin alphabet. Many of the apparently silent letters are actually giving cues to the finer points of the pronunciation of other letters nearby. In particular “h” is more of a diacritical mark than a separate letter, and many of the extra vowel letters are there to modify adjacent consonants. However some of them do represent dipthongs as an English speaker would expect, and I do have a lot of difficulty in determining which are of which kind!
The real problem with getting these names right is that many of the sounds simply don’t occur in English. This is why most pronunciation guides which respell the names in an English-like way are doomed to failure. But it is worse than that; even when we hear the names spoken by a native, we tend to subconsciously map what we hear onto the phonemic structure of our native language, so what comes out of the mouth is not what went into the ears. We just have to hope that we can manage well enough to avoid the most serious gaffes.
The site http://www.akerbeltz.org/fuaimean/roradh.htm is the best online treatment of Gaelic pronunciation I’ve seen. But it is rather detailed.
Also there are some very useful “native speaker” sound clips on http://www.munromagic.com/
But in some cases these merely add to the mystery of it all. GM/CS-040 and CM/CS-048 are both “Meall Buidhe”, and they’re not very far apart. But munromagic.com gives them very different pronunciations (and it sounds to me like the same speaker has recorded both clips). So yes, there are rules, but they’re not the whole story.
