Kitz Forum
Chat => Chit Chat => Topic started by: Weaver on December 20, 2021, 09:16:07 PM
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I believe that this was taken from the top of Ladhar-Bheinn, a mountain on the mainland, which I look at from my bedroom window every day.
(https://i.postimg.cc/KcQV71gm/CBCF05-C7-1-EAC-4656-870-B-AA5-EBC6797-E2.jpg)
Ladhar is Gaelic for ‘hoof’ which is very apparent for looking at the shape of the peak. This shot is taken from the almost inaccessible Cnòideart region of the mainland, where the only way in is a very long walk or a short ferry ride from Mallaig across the sea-loch to the otherwise inaccessible village of Inbhir Idhe, a village I have never been to, I’m afraid, and which has no road. When I was a student at https://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk, I used to look across the sea towards Cnòideart and this mountain.
We are looking west to Skye and the cloud hides the sea. The nearest and lowest hill on Skye will be Beinn nan Càrn, which is right behind my house; my house lies on the slope of it facing east. My house and all of the Skye lower hills are under the cloud.
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Interesting. :)
I had to make use of Google Maps (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ladhar+Bheinn/@57.2190357,-5.7730323,10z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x488ea364dc537a61:0x1d0c681aff302110!8m2!3d57.07525!4d-5.5917499) to see the spatial relationship of the mentioned locations.
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I've only been to Skye once when I used a Rail Rover ticket to go round Scotland about 45 years ago - stayed in Broadford youth hostel.
Used the post bus to get to the start and climbed Blà Bheinn which I think will be one of the other peaks that can be seen.
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I've only been as far as Glasgow, though there's some nice scenery on the train route.
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> spatial relationship of the mentioned locations.
did you manage to make sense of it?
@Jelv The Post Bus saves you a long walk from Broadford and possibly an even longer one back.
Blà Bheinn is slightly to the right of centre, highest in that group. The distances distort the absolute heights. I’m having trouble myself making out the enormous Beinn na Caillich which towers above Broadford. Shadows are seen when one mountain casts its shadow horizontally on the side of another, the sun being still so very low. I’d say this is before sunrise in fact
The pronunciation of Ladhar Bheinn is not obvious. The {Bh} is a /v/, the {inn} is like the ni in dominion, like ny, also in canyon. The La in Ladhar is like Eng. “lad" and also Gaelic Blà, but crucially since there is an "a" next to it, the sound is a back /ɫ̪/ like in Lancs English, or in many parts of the lowlands. (It’s unknown in the English of the Gaelic-speakers of the Highlands though, which by the way is nothing like the English of the Lowlands.) I don’t have this sound routinely or even at all in my own Derbyshire/Staffordshire English. It’s (grammatically) vital to pronounce it that way, exactly the same as in "Blà", it’s essential to get both right. That strong, back "lowland" back /ɫ̪/ is opposed to say the ili < idhli in “Gàidhlig" pron. /ga:lik’/ where the {à} is long and is a Yorkshire-like front /a:/, not like southern Engl. The dh is silent, just acting as a syllable separator now, although its loss has had a strange effect on the preceding a sound. I am unsure how the first a in Ladhar is pronounced; it varies a bit according to dialect and I keep on meaning to ask my neighbour for the definitive version. The r in {ar} is strongly pronounced when compared with English.
When you have one or more consonants, the vowels written both before and after them will either be e or i, both before and after, or alternatively: a o u, before and after. If the first or second vowel group is chosen then this alters the consonant’s sound crucially. So the vowels occcur in matching pairs, matching according to which if these two groups they belong to. This choice of vowel before and after consonants is like a shift key or an escape code for the sound of the consonant or consonant group. This is why the spelling of gaelic looks so odd, all the extra vowels, and is one of the reasons why pronunciation is so extremely difficult. Consider the single vs double consonants’ effect on viowels eg hopping, hoping., also the effect of adding a silent written e, as in mac vs mace, pac vs pace, where the e is like a shift state encoding system.
Wiktionary has the in my view excellent [ɫ̪ɤ.əɾ] for "ladhar". This word is one of a group whose pronunciation has become rather odd historically and now as with many words in Gaelic, the pronunciation is no longer straightforwardly derived from their spelling. Just like English in fact.
Just as in all Celtic Languages, when the ‘abnormal’ word order is used, modifier-head, in this case, adjective + the head noun, the head noun is lenited. So /b/ -> /v/ in bheinn where Ladhar or Blà precedes. The normal word order would be the other way around, with an adjective following the head noun as in the name of my house "torr gorm" where the adjective "gorm" is second. I can’t think of any decent examples from Welsh off hand, but cor + ci = cor gi = "corgi", where the head element the noun ci lenited to become gi and comes second, in abnormal position.
I was just wondering what the excess construction charges would be for 10 gigabit fibre into Inbhir Ìdhe in Cnòideart, at the base if this mountain, would be. Coming from Mallaig to the South (offscreen in the photo, close up, to the left) across Loch Nibheis would be the logical choice. Crossing the sea from Skye would give the possibility of scrounging some bandwidth from SMO on the other side of the atlantic, at prohibitive cost.
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We know The Beinn very well (in English: Hill of the Old Hag). My husband Aonghas and I hiked it many times in our younger days. Last May sadly being the most memorable for all the wrong reasons. On the descent, Angy had one of his funny turns. We limped back to the motor home, and all seemed well. But as we left the village car park, Angy unfortunately slipped on the clutch, and plunged us straight into Broadford Bay. Alas, all too much for his old ticker. Dr Mackinnon's dosed him up with thrombolytics washed down with a hot toddy, and the RAC commissioned a 25 ton crane from Inverness to recover the Fiat which had shed its propshaft. All in all, an eventful day-trip to Skye.
Below, the western slope of Beinn na Caillich, with Bessie our Ducato in the foreground, being winched off Broadford beach.
(https://i.imgur.com/Gnm4jrR.jpg)
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A very warm welcome to the forum, and sorry to hear of your misfortunes. I too have had the pleasure of thrombolytics in the Broadford Hospital before a helicopter ride to Inverness. I have not however had the pleasure of scaling Beinn na Caillich.