Actually, Irish, particularly Old Irish is objectively more difficult than many other languages. It has a number of different features which are all rare in world languages, and has also undergone rapid and significant morphological changes. Modern Welsh and Modern Breton, on the other hand, are pretty comparable to other European languages.
That said, I really appreciate what you said, because while vontsira obviously didn’t mean anything negative, the collective throwing up of hands and going “it’s just too hard” is exactly why English is continuing to make inroads and destroy the Celtic languages in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany. I do think people who aren’t living in a Celtic country can be excused for not wanting to put in the tremendous effort required.
And I’m trying to make you aware that there are people out there who hear this kind of joking all the time and even if you personally don’t mean it nastily in one particular instance, it might have a cumulative effect of alienating people.
And also that ultimately “your culture is too complicated for me to understand” is not really a very funny sentiment.
I can never seem to spell Misssisssipppiiiii or Massachchcuusssettts on the first pass, either, no matter how hard I try. (I’m a visual speller and have to see the mistake before I can fix it.)
Mississippi is easy for me (just double all the consonants except the first), but the one that always trips me up is Cincinnati. I have to remind myself that it’s “Cin-cin-nati.” I usually want to either double both the “n” and “t” or just double the “t.”
I’ve noticed that the British love to smash words together. Worcestershire is “worstersher”, Leicestershire is “lestersher”, etc.
Of course, we American’s try to follow suit in more provincial ways. I used to live in a town with a street called Orangeburg and locals would shorten it to “o-burg”. And a good way to get smacked in the face by someone is to call San Francisco “frisco”.
Must be a comingling of dialectal variation and of trying to transliterate. It’s eme - i - ese - otra ese - i - ese - otra ese - i - pe - otra pe - i (with different variations to deal with the repetition), or misisipi, como suena pero con cuatro eses y dos pes (misisipi exactly as it sounds but with four s and two p).
How is one supposed to pronounce a P by itself, with no vowels?
You’re going to make me explain a joke, aren’t you?
If you’re an English speaker who doesn’t know how the alphabet sounds in Spanish, then it sounds like the way I wrote it out.
The Spanish pronunciation of *M[/i} — eme — sounds in English like “M-A.” The Spanish pronunciation of “I” sounds like the English pronunciation of E. P sounds reasonably similar in Spanish and English, so I left it the same.
No, it’s not. Siobhan is a feminine form of Sean (as is Sinead, via a different route), which is the Gaelic form of John. Yvonne is a feminine form of Yves, which comes from a word meaning ‘yew’.
Which is what I said. Just because English does not normally use accents does not mean that all words don’t use them.
Mississippi was drilled into out heads in grade school. I will have to try to remember your method for [del]Cinncinati[/del] [del]Cincinnatti[/del]
Cincinnati.
Don’t forget fined $25 (which was more money back then).
Well, if we are going with place names, Absaroka Mountains are spelled kinda funny, and no one hearing the name “Puyallup” for the first time would guess it was spelt that way.
OK – I’m a lump of shit, and I duly abase myself – albeit I consider myself (English) a lover of my Celtic fellow-inhabitants of the British island group – notwithstanding what seems to me the strangeness of their languages (which I greatly hope may long survive as birth-speeches).
I’m not religious – but Lent is coming up. I hereby punish myself by renouncing participation on the SDMB (which I greatly enjoy) from now until Easter Sunday, April 5th. After that – hopefully, a clean slate?
