Tea shop.
I believe it’s a dental plosive, as in Indian languages.
That might be true, but in this case I think you mean that the orthography makes no sense?
I don’t know. Not when I say it, but I’m neither a native speaker nor a resident of Ireland, and my accent is admittedly atrocious.
Damn you! I came in here to say that!
all the pronounciations on this page would be acceptable in ireland
Can we make fun of how the RTÉ presenters say “Oireachtas”? Please?
Perhaps I’m missing something, but aren’t those entirely reasonable approximations when speaking English?
Let me guess: Oy-RECK-tuss?
On a tangentially related note:
Can the BBC please stop calling the Dáil the Irish “parliament”? :mad:
(Yes, I know I’ve complained about that on SDMB before!)
On an almost entirely unrelated note:
I was amused to stumble across a Wikipedia article a couple of days ago that lists “Guard” as an Irish English word that’s of Irish Gaelic origin (as in “Garda [Síochána]”). :rolleyes:
“Eve” is spelled Aoibh.
Why?
Because it’s just plumb wrong! 
The Oireachtas is the Republic’s parliament. While the Dáil is of course of great political significance, it is only one of the two chambers of the Oireachtas; it’s broadly equivalent to the UK’s House of Commons.
Depending on the context, references to the British parliament also often mean just the House of Commons.
I’m afraid you’ll have to explain what’s wrong with that. You object because Guard is of middle English -->old French origin? Or that it’s illogical to think that guard came from the name for the police rather than the other way around?
::aside:: Do Irish police cars really say Garda on them instead of Police? They did in The Daisy Chain but there weren’t any other prominent written words in the movie, so I couldn’t figure out if other signage was in Gaelic too. I live in a part of the US where English/French signage exists, but not just French ::/aside::
Technically, the UK Parliament is the whole shebang considered as a whole: Commons, Lords, and the Queen.
“Irish,” not “Gaelic.” (Not all Gaelic is Irish.)
Yes, the cars say “Garda.”
There is plenty of bilingual signage in Ireland, and plenty of English-only. You’ll find Irish-only in small pockets in the west.
Not even close. It’s more like “EER-ach-thus”. It may be technically closer to the proper pronunciation in Irish, but they say it that way even when speaking English, and absolutely nobody pronounces it that way in English.
It’s the only house of Parliament that actually does anything, so it doesn’t bother me.
I don’t think that’s strictly incorrect, to the extent that the Garda Síochána are referred to in English as “guards”. When people call them “guards” (and they do) they’re doing it as shorthand for “Garda(í)”. If the Irish word for “guard” was something that sounded absolutely nothing like the English word I don’t believe they’d be called “guards” in English, they’d probably just be called “police”.
I was really inpressed for a minute there. but then you had to go and be rude.
Our system was fine. Having been forced to change to the anglo alphabet we have devised various spelling rules in order to convey the proper pronunciation.
Gaeilge spelling made no sense to me at all, until I learned the old script while studying Sean Nos. Now I have very little trouble getting the spelling correct, though I’m still fairly hopeless with tense.
So how do people in Ireland pronounce “Oireachtas” when speaking in English?
I think a news organisation that prides itself on its journalism should be capable of making technically correct statements in its articles on political or constitutional affairs. And given the similarities between the Dáil and the House of Commons, it’s inexcusable; people in the UK already have a familiarity with a similar political model.
Given that “guards” already existed in English, it’s hardly a borrowing from Irish! And is the Irish term even of Celtic origin?
Also, I’m wondering if the Irish name for the force was in fact coined from “Civic Guard”, rather than the other way around.
But I may be talking rubbish!
I did not mean to be rude, and I hope you don’t take it as further rudeness when I challenge what you say here. The Gaelic alphabet and the Roman alphabet are the same as used for Irish. The only difference between the two is for a set of nine consonants.
Roman: bh ch dh fh gh mh ph sh th
Gaelic: ḃ c· ḋ ḟ g· ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ
[in case these appear as little squares or question marks, it’s bcdfgmpst with a little dot over each, as with i & j. Also, I can’t type the C or G properly here, so imagine the dot is above.]
Using a diacritic (called the punctum delens) rather than an H seems like a superior system to me, especially in a language where the word “cat” can become “chat” in certain grammatical environments. But that would still leave you with:
taoiseac·
and
oireac·tas
So the Gaelic type does not solve the problem of indicating consonant quality. It also does not improve on the nasal mutation (eclipsis), where when P changes to B it is written BP. Finally, you have stated a fact that is incorrect: you weren’t “forced to change.” As the wiki article you give says, the change happened after Irish independence, and a few books are still published in Gaelic type. Who would have done the forcing? I like Gaelic type too, but your argument is sort of like saying German is written better with Fraktur. In both cases the native system was largely abandoned in order to integrate with the other writing systems of Europe.
ċġ
I pressed the letter and then followed it with Unicode character U+0307, “Combining dot above”. Doesn’t work on all letters for some reason.
Sunspace: awesome, thanks.