Understood, I thought that was what you meant. The Gleann Eilg tiny ferry is still going strong. Janet knows the current tiny ferry skipper’s mum as she lived in this house before we did and might have been born in this bedroom where I write this now, if memory serves.
I mentioned the Gleann Eilg ferry because of the Gleann Eilg brochs which are very impressive and the tiny ferry is the way to go over to that remote part of the mainland. If you were to drive all the way to the far end of that road, into Loch Shubhairne (anglicised as Hourn pron ‘hoo’ like shoo. "sh" is pronounced [h] in Gàidhlig. [normal people can had a nap for the next half hour]
Here it’s an initial written sh because it’s a proper noun that is in the genitive case, but that doesn’t really explain anything, it’s just an observation and in twenty three years I have been unable to get any real idea of why this is. It meand ‘the loch of <x>. The n is an ñ - IPA [nʲ] because of the i and e bracketing it; u is pronounced -o-; the bh is, in this environment, either nothing at all, or faintly a /w/, and the ai is like the [ə] or so-called schwa the vowel of the ‘-er’ in ‘butter’; so the thing sounds like ‘doer’ ‘shoer’; the n bracketed by i and e is like in ‘seein ya’’, the r is effectively just a y or nonexistent, prob best just not to pronounce it at all as the i-e bracketing changes the r to be a southern english r (as opposed to a hard grilled distinct strong r) but in this case because of the i-e final -e combination pronounce if you can’t pronounce the r as a y IPA [j] then just don’t pronounce if. The i is only written there to indicate the quality of the r and the n and because there is an e following. Wherever you have a medial consonant the vowels on either side of it have to have a certain relationship in writing. Set A is written {i,e}, called ‘caol’. Set B is written {a,o,u} called ‘leathan’. Say the pattern is VC(C*)V or in more detail V₁C(C*)V₂ then V₁ and V₂ would have to both be from the same set, ie both from set A or both from set B. also the consonant would have to belong to one of two sets of different-sounding variant consonants associated with A or B. Worse still, for each written consonantal there are four subsets each with a single member so giving us four actual sounds, one pair of subsets is the subset A = { A, AL} }and one pair of subsets is the subset B - { B, BL} }. The individual consonants are notated here A, AL, B, BL and the -L members are expressed in writing with a postfixed silent h after the core written consonant. We have an example here of CBL in sh- with h written after it and an a|o|u after it. We can of course write four regexes for these. The core consonant is not one sound though but has four phonemic (which means phonetic differences are vital for meaning/understanding) consonant sound values which all sound completely different and the difference are vital, mucking them up sometimes changes the meaning or more likely makes the result gibberish. In English dialects the pronunciation of the written letter l in sleep, slop, silly, sillier, milk, alpha, allo, Alistair might in different in some places in some dialects but it doesn’t really matter exactly how you pronounce it, it all means the same thing. It is said not to be ‘phonemic’ in English. In other languages Gàidhlig included the different kinds of sound represented by Latin letters with different encoded with shifts and prefix-suffix (circumfix??) options are phonemic that is vital for meaning. So correct pronunciation can be a challenge, one of the hard things about an otherwise very simple easy language, because there are approximately four times as many sounds in Gàidhlig as in English or Welsh or French, certainly four consonants for many English stops p t k b d g r l m n s f anyway (very approximately, leaving out some important details), there is a coding system to fit all these sounds into the Latin alphabet that uses escape codes and shift sets. Like English hoping hopping, mac and mace with doubled vs single consonants and i and e in English. The coding is a postponed h or no h, plus brackets ing by vowels A: (i|e) CAL or (i|e), or (i|e) CBL (i|e), or (a|o|u) CB(a|o|u) or (a|o|u) CBL (a|o|u). The CBL subset of consonants, written as <C>h - in fact [ie]Ch[ie] or [aou]Ch[aou], are called the ‘lenited’ set and the change to that set from the other set, ie no -h to with a postfixed -h is called ‘lenition’; secondly in the other dimension, changing from the [aou]-bracketed consonants (‘leathan’ in Gàidhlig) to the [ie]-bracketed subset (‘caol’) is called ‘slenderisation’ or less obscurely but extremely inaccurately ‘palatalisation’ so I recommend the former unless you understand enough about phonetics and want to make a phonetic point not a grammatical one. The words call, chall, ciall, chiall, (or ceann, cheann) are all real words and the written c has four different sounds [kʰ], [\x], [xʲ] > [ç]/[xʲ] - the first pair, depending on context, could mean ‘her loss’/‘a loss’, or ‘his loss’/‘to (a) loss’/‘its loss’; the second pair similar set based on ‘ciall’ which has many meanings and the last pair ‘ceann’ means’ ‘head’ and the same derived set again.
The vowels in the ie and aou bracket sets may or may not be pronounced, they may be silent and only be there because of the requirement for completing the escape sequence bracketing to indicate which kind of the four possible consonants the consonant is, or alternatively it may be heard a little as a glide or it may alter the vowels in either sound forming, a diphthong or it may be the main vowel. As an extreme the written letter o in the words fios [fɪs] ‘knowledge’/‘know’, and pìob [pʰʲiːp] and other such combinations is completely silent and it is only there to show unambiguously that the consonant s comes from set B and it is pronounced [s] not [ʃ], like the difference between coll. American Eng. ‘dis’ and ‘dish’ or ‘miss’ and ‘fish’. Taking the silent letter o out as in ‘ris’ [r’ɪʃ] (a preposition or a combined prepositions and pronoun melded form).
By the way, the four possibilities can be true for non medial consonants too, ie initial or final consonants.
Coming back to our word, after a digression within a digression *n, most importantly the last e is actually pronounced, as [(j)ə] or so-called schwa,the vowel of the ‘-er’ in ‘butter’ in southern England English where Rs are not pronounced.
So we finally, putting it all together, have the [huə(r’)nʲə], [‘huɚnʲə] I’m "suein’ ya!" But with an /h/ instead as I couldn’t find an English word starting with an h. One other point; it’s not one syllable - it’s 2.5 or even 3 syllables I suspect. Some people nowadays, when faced with this kind of word-form with a final e o it, are keen to even strengthen the last syllable making it s full no-doubt about it syllable by adding a final consonant after the -e, this is by analogy with other words that have this form legitimately. Anyway as for the correct pronunciation and exact syllable count, I need to ask my neighbour for a definitive opinion.
How’s that for getting carried away. Mea culpa. When you see and hear Gàidhlig spoken in the coop (stalking, patience, luck) or more likely on the radio (100% success) or www or down the road at smo.uhi.ac.uk, where Gàidhlig is compulsory and you (well not ‘you’, rather I) can get the cane for speaking English then you see that this jumble of written letters produces so very many sounds and without understanding the four way escaping ie-C-ie vs aou-C-aou vs ie-Ch-ie vs aou-Ch-aou and I didn’t even mention the option of double consonants vs single consonants ll rr nn (mm is no longer written for some reason, it’s just m now, and other double consonants are not found or are no longer found) the expected rh lh nh are not written but can sometimes be heard as they are grammatically significant.