Blas na Gàidhlig
The Practical Guide to Gaelic Pronunciation
Michael Bauer | 31st March 2011
Hardback
£35.00 | Available
ISBN 9781907165009
C nan L |
Ullapool Bks | Blackwell's
| Amazon
UK
Hugendubel
| Amazon
DE
McNally
| Amazon
CA
Barnes
& Noble | Amazon
US
Fishpond.com.au
Fishpond.co.nz
This book tackles the thorny issue of Scottish Gaelic
pronunciation in an engaging and clear manner without loosing
track of the bigger picture and the fine detail. It was
written with three main reader groups in mind:
- adult learners of Gaelic (from total beginner up to highly
advanced learners who want to improve their pronunciation and
comprehension skills)
- teachers and tutors of Gaelic who wish to become more
effective in teaching pronunciation to adult learners of the
language and schoolchildren who have no Gaelic at home
- native speakers of the language who wish to gain a better
understanding of how their language works.
It assumes no prior knowledge and takes the reader on a
complete journey through the marvels of the Gaelic sound
system. It comes with over 120 sets of exercises, numerous
sound files (see below), both technical and entertaining
illustrations and a recipe for some Christmas baking.
No single solution will ever exist which will solve all the
problems facing the learners of Gaelic when it comes to
pronunciation but, without doubt, this book will help learners
and teachers of the language take a large step forwards.
Below you can find the PDF files which contain the sound
files. We had initially considered making a CD or DVD but
there are so many sound files that you'd just go nuts pressing
the Forward button, so we decided on integrating the sound
files into PDFs.
You can download them as many times as you want but we
recommend saving them onto your own hard drive. You will need
a program that can open PDF files, for example PDFCreator, Foxit or Acrobat Reader.
If the program asks you if you wish to trust the document, you
will have to consent before the sound will play.
Mac Users: Please note that
some Mac systems have a problem with playing sound which has
been integrated into PDFs which we have no control over. The
problem may resolve itself if you open the PDF via the
Finder (as opposed to the in-browser PDF viewer).
Failing that, this workaround seems to have worked for some
users:
1. Download a PDF and open the file via the Finder.
2. Click on a Play button. The sound file will not
play but you should see a message saying some features have
been disabled for security reasons.
3. Click the Options tag to the right of this
message. You will be asked whether you want to trust this
document (Once or Always). Choose Always
and the sound files should now play.
As there are several separate downloads, the procedure has
to be repeated for each. Provided you chose Always trust
then the sound should enabled permanently.
It may we worth your while trying alternative PDF readers
too. We have been told by one user that Readdle’s PDF Expert
(version 6 and later) is capable of playing the sound as
intended.
If this also does not work either, please use the mp3 files
(below). We're sorry about the inconvenience but we have not
been able to find a fix for this that we can implement on
our side.
Sound files for
pages 001-078 | Sound files for
pages 079-159
Sound files for
pages 160-165 | Sound files for
pages 166-186
Sound files for
pages 187-215 | Sound files for
pages 216-241
Sound files for
pages 242-268 | Sound files for
pages 269-292
Sound files for
pages 293-302 | Sound files for
pages 303-322
Sound files for
pages 323-345 | Sound files for
pages 346-361
Sound files for
pages 362-385 | Sound files for
pages 456-478
If you want the plain mp3 files, then download the following
and then unzip:
The mp3 files 001-150 | The mp3 files 151-300
The mp3 files 301-450 | The mp3 files 451-553
We have also prepared a printable version of the Guide to
Reading Gaelic:
The Full Guide
(with the examples)
The Concise Guide (just the
rules without the example)