[Ketman]

Originally Posted by StGeorge

Well, as it happens, thats where your wrong and the confusion sets in.

The Irish, or more to the point, Celts..do have their own language....like just about most nations in the world. But my point is that when these different cultures originally converged, who decided that the translation from the symbols/characters/letters to anothers had such a variance on the sound?

EG: There is no V in Irish, but when the original Irish symbol (probably from the Ogham Alphabet) was tanslated as a sound, why wasnt the English symbol for V used?

You're right. The only way you can transcribe a word into another alphabet is phonetically - i.e. you write what it sounds like. That's especially true with alphabets that are very dissimilar, like the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Sound is all you've got. That's why it drives me nuts when you get a Russian name like Gorbachev, and then they tell you it's pronounced Gorbachov. I'm thinking, why didn't you write it Gorbachov in the first place, you nutjob!

[StGeorge]

Originally Posted by Ketman

You're right. The only way you can transcribe a word into another alphabet is phonetically - i.e. you write what it sounds like. That's especially true with alphabets that are very dissimilar, like the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Sound is all you've got. That's why it drives me nuts when you get a Russian name like Gorbachev, and then they tell you it's pronounced Gorbachov. I'm thinking, why didn't you write it Gorbachov in the first place, you nutjob!

That is my point Ketman, but if you look at that piece i highlighted on the History of the Irish language, and also at the piece Oooo has linked, then you see that both languages have changed in the written formed many times and it has been a bit of a bind for the scholars to keep up and to make sense of differing interpretations.

Facinating stuff( boring to some i guess, and not exactly BB) and thanks to those that contributed in an intelligent manner.