Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>Fairly recently, I saw for the first time a statement that Irish Gaelic
>has spelling rules at least in part to represent more than five vowel
>sounds, but that the rules are different from those for English. Assuming
>that to be true, it was really helpful.
>
>

What was that quote of And Rosta's about Gaelic spelling? Something
about having a lot of respect for the Irish for using something that
perverse. I remember when I was trying to learn Scottish Gaelic... I'd
been spoiled by my experience with Welsh, which has a very simple and
transparent writing system, though with usages that take a little
getting used to. With Scottish, I described it as feeling like the guy
who invented the pronunciation and the guy who invented the spelling
weren't on speaking terms with each other.

It's been suggested that Gaelic would do rather well written in
Cyrillic, where they already HAVE two series of vowels for broad and
slender. I've also mused about writing Welsh in Hebrew, where the
mutations look less drastic (not unlike the old Irish convention of
dotting the aspirated letters).

(Surely you didn't think every language managed its vowels like
English? Bearing in mind that English is just about unique among
Latin-script languages in its use of the vowel-letters: the Great Vowel
Shift affected only it).

~mark