A funny coincidence about Bob's surname. I attended a talk by Mark Wringe about Seon Carsuel, John CARSWELL, who was responsible for the first printed book (as opposed to handwritten manuscripts) in Gaelic, a 1567 translation of John Knox's Book of Common Order. Carswell included a statement calling for the publication of the Bible andother books in the Gaelic of Scotland and Ireland as they were in Latin and English. Carswell had classical training, so he used the learned form of Gaelic rather than the common local speech, but because of this training he used proper Gaelic spelling rather than the 'Gaylick' which Gaelic speakers who had only learned to read and write in English wrote. So it may be thanks to Carswell that in Scotland we don't write as the Manx do. Of the three presently used systems, Scottish, Irish and Manx, my amateur opinion is that Scottish Gaelic orthography best represents the sounds of the language.