George McLennan – författare

A handy reference guide to Gaelic-derived words and expressions in common usage in English. Like George McLennan’s previously successful book “Scots Gaelic - An Introduction to the Basics”, “Gaelic and English - Their Common Origins” and “A Gaelic Alphabet - A Guide to the Pronunciation of Gaelic Letters and Words”, this book will be a great help to anyone with an interest in the links between the two languages. It forms a valuable reference tool to which readers will return again and again.

The modern Gaelic alphabet has 18 letters - Gaelic simply needs a smaller alphabet to make its sounds. To pronounce Gaelic words correctly you need to know what the sounds of the letters are, particularly the sounds of combinations of letters. Using his knowledge of the conventions of the language and not a little humour, George McLennan offers a straightforward guide to the Gaelic alphabet. Placenames and surnames are used to illustrate particular pronunciations, in the expectation that most people will be familiar with them. Each letter is discussed separately. Combinations of consonants, eg chd, are dealt with or referred to under the first letter. The vowels are then done in alphabetical order as are groups of vowels. Like its sucessful campanion volume Scots Gaelic an introduction to the basics, A Gaelic Alphabet will be of great help to learners and speakers of the language.

The purpose of this book is to provide a brief introduction to the Gaelic language with a selective discussion of its main features. In contrast to native speakers, who absorb the language as children, adults who are learning Gaelic from scratch often derive much benefitfrom knowing why the language takes its shape.

This book sets out to illustrate the relationship between Gaelic and English words within the wider Indo-European context. Many Scots, finding Gaelic difficult, are unaware that much of Gaelic comes originally from the same source as English (and many other European languages), this origin being an early language of Europe and areas of the Indian sub-continent. Known as Indo-European, this long vanished language evolved in various ways to become the modern European languages we know today.

This book was written as a companion volume to the earlier Slogans Galore - Gaelic words in English. There has been quite a surge of interest in Scots in recent years after a long period of discouragement and neglect and this volume highlights the long intertwined history of the Scots language and Scottish Gaelic by examining words that have been borrowed into Scots over the centuries.