Minority languages meeting ?

Tha mi gu math, tapadh leat ! Yes, pronunciation seems to be a problem for beginners because we have several sounds not found in English or French. What I plan to do is record a video for beginners. I think it is more difficult to learn a minority language because of the relative lack of resources. What I can do before I get organised with the equipment that I would need is to give you some links to where you can find beginner's Gaelic. This is another reason why I had the idea of a meeting for minority languages.

In terms of pronunciation, I'll start with vowels, a, e, i, o, u - basically equivelent to the Spanish aeiou, and with an accent they are pronounced very long. There are two other sounds that are not phonetic: ao which is pronounced like the French eu or the German oh but with an umlaut on the o. Another Gaelic sound is eu which is not pronounced like the French version - this sound is like a long e and sometimes like the diphthong ia - as in the English words 'rain' and 'area'. Consonants, the sounds which don't exist in English are gh which exists in Arabic, Biblical Hebrew and modern Greek. It is a gutteral g sound, similar to German ch but voiced. We also have a glottal stop in some dialects, and we have the German ch sound as well as the Norwegian kj sound. Gaelic is also pronounced very far forward in the mouth, and the letters l n r t and d tend to be dental next to the vowels aou and palatal next to the vowels ei.

Okay, here are some links for you as promised (you will find many links when you click on this link - it is from the Gaelic college on the Isle of Skye, Sabhal Mor Ostaig)

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/ionnsachadh/

Le gach beannachd

Richard

p.s. si quelqu'un voudrais un peu d'assistance avec le gaelique ecossais en francais - je parle le francais pas courament mais assez pour discuter agus ma ta gaeilge na h-eirinn ag duine ar bith bhinn ar leth sona a bheth ag deanamh conalta leat

Ciamar a thu! As fo myself I've been struggling hard with Scottish Gaelic, finnaly giving up 'coz of the pronunciation, except for thai and Cantonese, I've never found something that hard to cope may be you ve got some links towards scottish?