[net.nlang] Dun Laoghaire, a Reply to Goldstein

miker@sri-unix (07/19/82)

Dun Laoghaire is pronounced (somewhat like) "done leary" in Irish
because that's the way it is spelled.  I said that the spelling was
fairly regular, but I didn't say that the letters had the same values
that they do in English.  Furthermore, I didn't claim that the Irish
system was perfect, but merely a great improvement over the former
spelling.  It is not totally phonetic, like Italian spelling is reputed
to be (but is it really? Italian speakers please comment).  They had
to make compromises among the way things are pronounced, the
relationships of words and recognisable similarities to the old spelling,
in order to come up with something reasonable that people would accept.

"Dunleary" is actually an Anglicisation of the Irish pronunciation which
is rather difficult to represent without an IPA character set--something
like "Dun Luheeghuhyruh", where "uh" is a schwa, "gh" is an aspirated g
and "y" is an slender glide vowel, and you run it all together really
fast.  It is really quite simple if you know the conventions.  There is
also the same factor at work that makes people accuse Ontarians of
pronouncing "Toronto" as "Trawna", i.e. slurring through common use.
The Irish equivalent of "Trawna" is pronouncing "Baile Atha Cliath"
(the Irish name for Dublin) as "Blah Clyah" (noting that "th" is pronounced
like English "h").

In regard to spelling the same word differently on road signs, I can
think of several explanations.  It took some time to get people to
change over to the new spelling, so there may be some older signs
still in use (after all, some of the mailboxes still have King George V's
initials on them).  If you are thinking about presence or absence of
"h"s or unpronounceable letter combinations such as "nd" or "mb" at the
beginning of words, these are not regarded as separate letters but as
grammatical alterations which can vary regionally or even according to
the whim of the speaker, somewhat like an umlaut for consonants.
Thus you can see both "Cois Farraige" and "Cois Fharraige"
(meaning "seaside"), and you might even see "Cois Bhfarraige",
though this would be unusual.  The equivalent in California
may be seen on Highway 280 between San Jose and San Francisco, where
of two signs for Canada Road, only one has a tilde over the n.
Another explanation is that they do it to confuse tourists.  If the
discussion is still going on in a couple of months, I'll let you know
the current situation.

If you are not familiar with Irish it probably seems quite complicated,
but it isn't really.  The key is to understand that letters are just
symbols which we adapt to represent the conventions of language.  You
might just as well complain that the Dutch don't pronounce the "j"
in "Dijkstra".