St Patrick's pronunciation
Given that tomorrow is St Patrick's Day, let's spend a moment with the language he encountered some 1,500 years ago when he set foot on Erin's green shore. OK, there's a bit of a linguistic leap involved here as Gaelic's been through the historical wringer since then, but why let inconvenient facts obstruct the flow?
Anyway, we'll take the Irish Gaelic word for "river" abhann and the word for "summer" samhradh and try to pronounce them. Not easy, is it? Well, here's how it works: the "abha" in abhann is pronounced "own" (to rhyme with "clown") and the "amha" as in samhradh is pronounced "sow (the female pig)-ruh". That very practical advice has been posted on the website of Lincoln University, Missouri, in an article titled "The Pronunciation and Spelling of Modern Irish". It's a very basic introduction to the topic, to be sure, but a start.
Diarist of the day: Marie Belloc Lowndes, 16 March 1912"Lunched at 'Thirty' [luncheon club]. We all talked about the enduring power of love. Some of those present said that loves goes in a man when the woman becomes middle-aged. I said that is often amazed me to see how love endured, though I admitted that in a certain class -- the prosperous commercial class, no man, whatever his age, has any use for a woman, even for her company after she is say, forty. That is one of the things that strikes me in one circle I frequent. The moment you know a man at all well, he confides to you quite frankly what a bore he find his wife's friends -- that being a man of sixty talking of women between forty an forty-five."
