Jeri - a short story,

One day during my summer in Paris I asked a couple of business-type Frenchmen if they could direct me to a certain street. Three times they asked me to repeat it then said to each other the classic Oi! These Americans with their atrocious accents, who could understand them.

Just then a Chinese student (from China, ye see) stopped & asked if he could help. His French accent was thick, thick with Chinese, nearly comic - and in very halting French (nearly as bad as my own) he indicated the street was just two blocks over.

The Frenchmen shrugged their shoulders and walked on. I readily found the street where directed.

It still strikes me that The Chinese feller understood me easily and not the French.

(No, they didn't really say "Oi")

I'm sure that Gaughan has said on several occasions that he didn't care how you pronounce his name. Further, he holds that it's far better to render a song into English or USian than to inflict on your audience a poor Scottish accent. I don't know about that - you'd often have to be approximately as good a poet as the song writer to get some of the meanings across. Of course the issue of communicating that meaning to a non-Scots audience is an old problem, with which many have struggled.

I'm pretty sure I've heard 'loch' pronounced with both hard and soft guttural depending on where the speaker is from in Scotland. I won't bet too much on it though.