Sorry, teachers, but I think you know what I mean. I know there are a lot more teaching aids in schools now but making it competitive with losers and a winner who can brag about it for days can only help.
ByIain Maciver
Each school here in the Western Isles will get a Gaelic-language Scrabble set and it’s a really good idea.
It should make boring old Gaelic lessons a lot more fun. Sorry, teachers, but I think you know what I mean. I know there are a lot more teaching aids in schools now but making it competitive with losers and a winner who can brag about it for days can only help.
The Gaelic version only came out in December.
It’s the 29th language into which the board game is translated. With some languages, you can buy one version that you can use with other languages. Not Gaelic. It has fewer letters.
Try as hard as you like but you won’t find J, K, Q, V, W, X, Y or Z in the Gaelic set. We make up for that by combining letters to make it sound like the missing letters.
Put a b with an h and you have a v sound. Just as interestingly, put an a and an o together and you get a sound like a cow in distress.
Examples are aodann, for face, and caora, for sheep. Drag out that ao to sound like hungry cattle demanding their breakfast.
You also have to pretend that an absent letter is present. To get a sh sound, just write, er, s. Take the siar in Eileanan Siar. There is no h, but you still pronounce it sheer. Different rules, see?
And it’s sheer hell to learn all that as a learner, but Scrabble should get the basic rules in your bonce fairly quickly. Have I any more tips? Not a sausage.
That’s an interesting word. It comes from ancient French, when it was saussiche, for salted mince. It then turned up in 15-century England as sawsyge.
I remember us discussing it in a Gaelic class with a stand-in teacher who spoke Stornoway Gaelic, which is traditionally dire, but did not normally teach it.
To waste time, we asked sir about the Gaelic for the banger. From memory, on the blackboard he scrawled sosaidse. Good effort, sir, but completely and utterly wrong. It is actually isbean, pronounced ishban, if you’ve been keeping up. Although some people said siùsag, the BBC went with isbean.
Right, with all this talk of bangers, I’m drooling. Is it lunch yet? I need sausages. Links, maybe? Pork or beef? As I’m feeling forlorn, I’ll go looking for Lorne, but not for long. Just a furlong.
English Heritage is feeling a bit forlorn these days. That’s the body that looks after Stonehenge. It must be irritating it to learn that a main feature of their old stones is from Scotland. Not only are the Callanish Stones older than Stonehenge but their altar stone, at the centre of its circle, has been confirmed as from the north-east of Scotland, or possibly Orkney.
Whether we took it down to Wiltshire by road or sea, is not yet known but, either way, it was an incredible feat.
It must be hard for the Sassenachs to bear that their greatest visitor attraction is part-Scottish. That’s nearly as bad as Lewis people finding out that the
were discovered on Harris and were taken by sea to Loch Roag by the most skilled seafarers from south of Aline. That’s the estate at the Lewis-Harris border, or no man’s land. That’d drive us bonkers.
And we are all bonkers if we think that we are not being manipulated by the utter shock of learning about Oasis getting back together to make another fortune by making everyone think they had fallen out only for them to wait 15 years to announce a surprise reunion tour. There have been leaks, not just rumours, about it happening for months, if not years. Still, the media is falling over itself as if this was something out of the blue.
Yeah, Oasis was good. The guys are probably still good-ish. The songs are just the same as they were. No one will be interested in any new stuff. In other words, why should we fork out again to hear the same old stuff? I will just watch them on Youtube, when the lads had fewer wrinkles.
Meanwhile, when we play Scrabble, I tend to do quite well. It has to be said that Mrs X has had a few runs of good luck recently. One doesn’t wish to rub it in but I do sometimes let her win.
Annoyingly, she now claims that she lets me win. She has started calling me a walking dictionary. You know, I always thought that was the best compliment ever. My own wife telling me that I am smart and have a good vocabulary. Great.
But, no. She says it’s because I’m thick.
Iain Maciver is a former broadcaster and news reporter from the Outer Hebrides
