Just a line or two to confirm arrangement for our Western Isles trip. I will be arriving in Castlebay on the 23rd May via the late ferry arriving 22.40. Please can someone confirm this with landlady at B & B(Peter?). On return from Ullapool I have train reservation from Garve at 16.15 on 27th May to get me to Inverness for evening return to Crewe. That's it really, you guys have made all the lodgings arrangements so can you let me know what I might owe each of you for deposits etc At least this time there are no exchange rates to worry about. I can then settle in cash at outset of trip. Do we need to carry food and plan provisions to carry and distribute? Any cooking possible? required? and what do we do on sunday regards meals and drinking! Guidebooks & people I have spoken to (Scottish folk raised eyebrows at sunday in god-fearing presbetyrian Lewis re pubs,shops etc) indicate we may have problems.
Am excited as well as a little nervous about trip as its a bit of a mystery. My reading of 'The Lewis Man' by Peter May has confirmed to expect the worst and best the weather can throw at us but the landscape should be stunning and challenging in equal measure. Not getting very far with the Gaelic language though.
Good luck all with your various journeys to Castlebay I hope god willing we will all be there with our bikes(Clyde don't forget to tag it when travelling on Scotrail!) ready to set off Friday morning on our hebridean adventure
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ReplyDeleteA couple of things I've learned about the lingo. Like all Celtic languages (eg Welsh), word order is: verb, subject, object (so “bites the dog the postman”!) Also, there are series of initial consonant mutations. So the root word ‘mor’ (‘big’, ‘great’) can become ‘mhor’ after certain words, where the ‘mh’ is pronounced [v]. Likewise, ‘beag’ (‘small’) can become ‘bheag’, where the ‘bh’ is also pronounced [v]. The place we sail from on our second day is Àird Mhòr, which ought to be transcribed into English as something like ‘Ard Vor’ (but isn't!) I haven’t got my head round the pronunciation of the vowels. In particular, the ‘i’ appears all over the place but seems not to be pronounced much of the time! Some consonant clusters (dh, th, gh, etc) are often not pronounced either. Generally, it seems to me, the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is even less regular than in English (and that’s saying a lot!) – unlike Welsh, which is very regular. Wikipedia has a few articles where you can click on the pronunciation of certain words. ‘Uist’ in Gaelic sounds like it could be either ‘oo-eesht’ or ‘ooveesht’.
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