I recently bought an Enya CD, (Paint the Sky with Stars) and am enchanted by the song Ebudae. From the sites I’ve been to that give lyrics to this song, I am told it is in some sort of Gaelic. Now, perhaps I just can’t pronouce Gaelic at ALL, but the lyrics seem to be completely different from what I’m hearing. I hear a lot more “hoo-ah” and “hee-oo-ah” and “chee” sounds, whilst the lyrics have a much more varied look to them. Am I incorrect in my attempts at Gaelic phonetics?
~Ferry
I don’t speak Gaelic, but I’ve done some reading on related subjects, and from what I’ve seen, you can forget about trying to read gaelic and get the phonetics right if you don’t actually speak it and/or write it.
I wish I had the book with me so I could give a cite, but I remember reading it and saying “It’s pronounced HOW?”
As a former Herald in the SCA who did a lot of name documentation, I can attest to that. I had that reaction a lot.
Yep, pronunciation rules are very different, and differ between various regions of Ireland. “Bh” is pronouced V for example.
Taking a random line from what you linked to, and giving a rough pronunciation (Bear in mind I happily mix munster and connaught dialects, and hers is an ulster dialect, and that I got a D in Irish …):
Ceolann siad ar laetha geal, a bhí
kyullan sheed aar laha gyal, a vee
You get the idea…
And of course, Enya is really pronounced “Pe - gi Soo”. Honest.:rolleyes:
I transcribed the lyrics to “Smaointe” phonetically once so I could sing it as I played it on the piano. The only way I can do it without my Anglicised notes (which have the title as something like “Schmwintay”) is to try to match the Gaelic words to the phonetics by rote memorization.
In any case, the spelling and the pronunciation of Irish Gaelic seem, to an Uncultured American ™ like myself, to be almost completely unrelated. I mean, there’s rules, but I haven’t the time to learn them.
One Irish-American author I read recently put it this way: “The rules for spelling Gaelic in English were not merely written by a drunk, but by a mean drunk.”
She was right. 