alexseanchai: Katsuki Yuuri wearing a blue jacket and his glasses and holding a poodle, in front of the asexual pride flag with a rainbow heart inset. (Default)
I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Some may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
So now you are ready, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word, that looks like beard, but sounds like bird.
And dead, it's said like bed, not bead; for goodness' sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat. (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother, nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear, for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose—just look them up—and goose and choose
And cork and work and card and ward and font and front and word and sword
And do and go, then thwart and cart, come, come! I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why man alive! I've learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried, I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
—Author Unknown
alexseanchai: Malahide Castle, Ireland (Ireland)
So I have a copy of Living Language's Spoken World: Irish. Let's see how far I can get in the book before trying to pronounce these words drives me bugfuck. Reading the pronunciation section of the text tells me there's method to the madness, but to a native English speaker, it's still madness. "Dia dhuit" looks like it should be pronounced dee-ah doo-it, not d'iə something-it, I can't figure out whether the 'dh' comes out to γ, x, or j, where γ is like French r, x like ch in Scottish loch, and j like y in yacht. The y sound seems closest to what I'm hearing on the CD. (The "d'" is a 'th' like in that, because it is a slender D, which we know because it has a slender vowel—i, this time; the other's e—to its right. Or so the book says. It doesn't quite sound like a th sound to me.)

But this is where a tidge more than half of me comes from, and I'd like to be able to write poems in the language of these ancestors, you know?

Dia dhuit. Alex is ainm dom. Tá sé go deas bualadh leat.

(Hello. [More literally: God be with you.] Alex is my name. It is nice to meet you. [All one of you, because something in that sentence is singular and I don't yet know how to figure out what.])

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alexseanchai: Katsuki Yuuri wearing a blue jacket and his glasses and holding a poodle, in front of the asexual pride flag with a rainbow heart inset. (Default)
let me hear your voice tonight

December 2024

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