[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!