Wisbech is definitely Whizz- beach.
We've just started teaching some of our school kids a bit of Gaelic.
I studied it for a year and the spelling/pronunciations are just bizarre.
Oh Liberty will know this, but I should point out to others: the Irish is 'Gay lick'.
The Scottish version is 'Gal ick'.
It's the same with Welsh, which I used to speak quite well, in terms of spellings etc.
But the thing with that for me was, I had really good teachers.
Literally in the first Welsh lesson we were taught the alphabet.
So if you put any Welsh in front of me, I would be able to read it perfectly, because I know how to pronounce things.
Of course I wouldn't necessarily understand what I was reading.

Last edited by besleybean (February 26, 2016 6:39 am)

besleybean wrote:

Wisbech is definitely Whizz- beach.
We've just started teaching some of our school kids a bit of Gaelic.
I studied it for a year and the spelling/pronunciations are just bizarre.
Oh Liberty will know this, but I should point out to others: the Irish is 'Gay lick'.
The Scottish version is 'Gal ick'.
It's the same with Welsh, which I used to speak quite well, in terms of spellings etc.
But the thing with that for me was, I had really good teachers.
Literally in the first Welsh lesson we were taught the alphabet.
So if you put any Welsh in front of me, I would be able to read it perfectly, because I know how to pronounce things.
Of course I wouldn't necessarily understand what I was reading.

 
See all this is completely my geek linguist coming out but there's a thing called Orthographic transparency where Graphemes=morphemes always!

Polish is like that and yes I read books to my little Polish friend all the time quite perfectly without having a clue what I'm reading.

I love the weird spellings and pronunciation of British place names. They are often a key to the history of the place. Fairly near to us is a place called Tolleshunt Darcy...that's a corker.