The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #48833   Message #737372
Posted By: GUEST,Philippa
26-Jun-02 - 11:16 AM
Thread Name: BS: 100 thousand welcomes
Subject: RE: BS: 100 thousand welcomes
Roisín - I don't think anyone answered the question about Scots Gaelic.
Céad míle fáilte (Irish) and Ceud mile fàilte both mean "A hundred thousand welcomes"
The pronounciation is very similar in both languages. In Scotland the first vowel sound of "Fàilte" is held longer, more drawn out, than it is in Irish. Also in Scotland the word "Ceud" is more distinctly two syllables, something like "kay-ud" or "key-ud" said very quickly with the emphasis on the first syllable. (Can someone tell me if this almost 2 syllable sound is called a 'dipthong' or is that something else?). Whether you have more of a long a or long e sound depends on where in Scotland the speaker comes from. You may also see "ciad" to represent the "key-ud" type pronounciation, but in modern usage I believe 'ciad' is reserved to distinguish 'first' from 'hundreth' (in Irish we say and write 'chéad' for 1rst and 'céad' for 100th)
'Cead' means permission in both languages and is pronounced crisply with a short a sound.
I also don't think anyone answered your whole question, focussing instead on the pronounciation and correct spelling of the first word. Now I really hate doing these amateur phonetics, which we can all interpret in different ways. Also you need the rhythm and flow, you need to hear how the whole phase sounds. You may be able to find someone who can confidentially say this well-known phrase - without necessarily being a fluent speaker of Irish or Gaelic. Meanwhile, míle has a long i and a short e, something like me-lah and fáilte sounds something like faul-tcheh/tyeh. In all the words the stress in on the first syllable.


Diesel - Béal (mouth, beul in Sc. Gaelic, also has a 'sine fada'.
Bob, Liland, et al. we have several ways of word-processing the 'diacritical' letters. They don't all work on all systems. With the computer and applications I am using, Alt 0233 does give me é, but so does Alt+130 or ctrl+alt+e. For short messages I use what is simplest, but since sometimes these letters don't show up on the webpage the way they do on the screen.See Aili£ 쳌anai[sic] for an example So when I submit lyrics I usually use the find and replace functions to put in the more unwieldy codes such as &#233 = é. We have had a long discussion of this issue the fada in Irish vowels, Joe Offer provided a link to a 'ISO Latin 1 Character Entities and HTML Escape Sequence Table'
I remember someone - but not his name nor the details of the explanation - explaining why these types of codes are the most reliable. But I can't find that discussion. It may possibly have been in 'help' rather than in the 'forum'