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From: Alan Smaill <smaill@dcs.ed.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: words without vowels
In-Reply-To: cdh@oracorp.com's message of Tue, 9 May 1995 18:54:33 GMT
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	<1995May9.185433.19267@oracorp.com>
Date: Fri, 12 May 1995 11:33:30 GMT
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Douglas Harper writes:
In article <1995May9.185433.19267@oracorp.com> cdh@oracorp.com (Douglas Harper) writes:

 > In article <3oe9gl$iq6@news.primenet.com> farquhi@primenet.com
 > (Iain Farquhar) writes: 
      I read somewhere that the gh is a soft consonant in Gaelic, 
      sort of like a vocalized ch.

 > It would be interesting to know what relationship the current
 > Gaelic-influenced pronunciation of "Edinburgh" has to the
 > Anglo-Saxon original.  How *was* the final syllable pronounced?

I don't see any reason to think that Gaelic played a role here --
the Lothians have never been a Gaelic speaking area, for a start.
This is presumably just a different spelling for the English "borough".

Some Scots words ending in "gh" pronounce it as a (Scottish) ch,
not vocalised (eg laigh, haugh). That's the old English pronunciation too,
isn't it?




-- 
Alan Smaill                       email: A.Smaill@ed.ac.uk
LFCS, Dept. of Computer Science   tel: 44-31-650-2710
University of Edinburgh           
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, UK.            
