Thread: Stupid English for Russians...

Luff-bara? You can't be serious. I can believe that Featherstonehaugh is pronounced Fanshaw, but I'll never believe that the o in borough can be sounded as the a in 'car'. Did you mean 'burra' by any chance? (Is it in Leicestershire? If so, shouldn't it be Looff-burra in the local vernacular? ).

Well, the stress in on the 'Luff', can you hear any difference between unstressed 'bara' and 'burra'? I can't, and I thought 'bara' was easier on all the non-native English speakers (since English 'u' is so vague).

While we're on the -ough theme, which is the correct pronunciation of those O'Loughlin/MacLoughlin/etc surnames? I've heard 'olufflin' but 'maglocklin'.

'gh' is a soft 'g', just the same as Scots' 'ch' is a soft 'c'. (as in loch). In practice you'd be hard pushed to tell them apart.

so MacLoughlin/ MacLaughlin = маклохлин

Indeed, there are still many Scots who pronounce words like 'bright', 'light', 'ought' and so on in the same way, though it sounds awfully rustic.

If you watch that police drama Dalziel & Pascoe, they do indeed say Dee-el, but I would tend to think that it is only the characters who speak with the northen accents that do (some say things like mee-ak, mee-at, etc. so I thought it was the same phenomenon, you know). The announcer on BBC Prime, for instance, always says "...another episode of Dale & Pascoe". I've asked a few Brits and they rhyme it with Dale.

They're wrong. Simple as that. Scots pronounce it Dee-el, it's a Scottish name, QED. And relying on anyone at the BBC to correctly pronounce any place name or personal name not local to within 100 miles of London is an excerise in futility anyway .

According to those few Gaelic coursebooks I have the letter z isn't actually used in Gaelic. The books say that the Gaelic alphabet has only 18 letters (if we don't count the vowels with ` as extra letters). However, in one of the docs from the Scoats Leid Quarum site (unfortunately I can't quote from it at the moment) they say that z was often used in Scots to represent ng and other sounds.

You are, in fact, correct. I over-simplified somewhat. You have to remember that Scots and Gaelic were never completely isolated from each other, and, just as with modern languages, they were never static. Furthermore, at the time when they were the dominant languages in Scotland the vast majority of speakers were illiterate. The bizzarre 'z' spellings do indeed come from Scots, but they were attempts to transliterate sounds in Gealic that didn't have any equivalent in Scots, so that names and so on could be written down.

For what it's worth, not only am I from Southern Scotland, but I have a stupid and seemingly unnecessary 'Z' in my surname too (and spend my whole life explaining it's pronounciation to English people).

Originally Posted by scotcher

Well, the stress in on the 'Luff', can you hear any difference between unstressed 'bara' and 'burra'? I can't, and I thought 'bara' was easier on all the non-native English speakers (since English 'u' is so vague).

Sorry, my bad. I wrongly assumed that you meant the ah as in "park" and it certainly is different from uh. Why is 'u' vague?

Originally Posted by scotcher

Indeed, there are still many Scots who pronounce words like 'bright', 'light', 'ought' and so on in the same way, though it sounds awfully rustic.

Aye, I ken that one of my English teachers used to demonstrate it with the following phrase: It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht. And then there was this other word, dreich or drich (don't know how to really spell that) I picked up from my Glaswegian friends.

Sorry, my bad. I wrongly assumed that you meant the ah as in "park" and it certainly is different from uh. Why is 'u' vague?

I mean vague, as in, it can be assigned several phonetic values with seemingly little logic, especially for foreigners. Ukraine, pull, but, group, etc (vague )

Aye, I ken that one of my English teachers used to demonstrate it with the following phrase: It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht. And then there was this other word, dreich or drich (don't know how to really spell that) I picked up from my Glaswegian friends.

Hehe, 'ken' is a funny one. People in my home town in the Borders use it, as do some in the far north, but you'll get ribbed mercilessly for being a country bumpkin (ooh English diminutive), or a choochter (чухтер) if you try to use it in the central belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

I actually considered using that 'braw bricht moonlicht" phrase myself in my previous post, but couldn't be bothered to explain it, so I'm glad you've heard it

'Dreich' (дрих) is a kind of cold, half-very-light-rain/ half-hanging-mist that soaks you through to the skin no matter how waterproof your clothes may be, that afflicts much of Scotland (esp the west coast) on roughly 50% of all the days in any given year. The rest of the time it just rains