A Circle of Stones: Journeys and Meditations for Modern Celts - Erynn Rowan Laurie 1995

A Note on Gaelic Pronunciation

By Caera Aislingeach

There are a few different languages in the Gaelic branch of the Celtic language family, and at least 3 of them appear in this book.

The earliest one that appears in this book is academically called Old Irish, but is the ancestor to all of the modern Gaelic languages, which are Irish (Gaeilge), Scottish (Gàidhlig), and Manx (Gaelg). Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic both appear in this book as well. They are different languages, not just dialects of the same language; having Old Irish, modern Irish, and modern Scottish in the same book is approximately the equivalent of having Latin, modern Italian, and modern Spanish in the same book. As each of these languages has their own pronunciation rules, I am not going to include all of the rules for each language in this book; there are other good sources for each language elsewhere, and I have listed one starting point for each language in this book, at the end of this note. I am going to give a guide to my own pronunciation notation in the book, and a very general overview of how trying to read any Gaelic language is different from trying to read English. Reading in any language involves learning the rules of spelling and phonetics for that language. What makes trying to read a Gaelic language confusing if you already read English, is that the Gaelic languages use the same letter symbols to represent different sounds, and sound changes, than English. This makes it possible, and common, for strings of letters to appear in a Gaelic language that are impossible to pronounce using English phonetics; and even the ones that are possible may not be correct if you pronounce them using English phonetics. You have to learn the symbol system all over again, for each Gaelic language: they are not all the same as each other either.

For the approximate pronunciation guides in this book, I tried to write things out so a speaker of modern American English, who does not know any other European languages, would be able to make an approximate attempt at pronouncing the Gaelic. It is not possible to write out an exact pronunciation using letter combinations that are used in modern English consistently. However, we wanted to provide something for those who cannot already read the Gaelic languages, to at least be able to make an honest effort at using Gaelic prayers if you so desire. We aim to provide audio files also, as an additional guide to pronouncing the Gaelic passages in this book.

I wrote some vowels with an ’h’ after them in the pronunciation guides, such as “ah” or “oh”. “ah” is like the ’a’ in the word “father”; “oh” is like the ’o’ in the word “cold”. This is true even when they appear in the middle of a word.

If you would like to learn more about pronunciation in the Gaelic languages, I present one recommended source here for each language in this book. There are many other good resources available now as well, but these would give a good start:

For Old Irish:

Quin, E. G., Old-Irish Workbook, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin 1975

For modern Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig):

Robertson, Boyd and Iain Taylor, Teach Yourself Gaelic, NTC Publishing Group, 1993

For modern Irish Gaelic (Gaeilge):

Aislingeach, Caera, Traditional Irish Gaelic Children’s Songs, Cló Grá is Stór, 2006