Is it Irish to be Cuil?

[George Thompson]

When Mark Twain said that foreigners always spell better than they pronounce, he was thinking of Italians, but it applies in spades to the Irish.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
Date: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 9:03 am
Subject: Re: Is it Irish to be Cuil?
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU


> "Cuil", and certainly "Cuill" as anything close to cool sounds like a
> Scottish Gaelic pronunciation to me.  I remember when I was \trying
> to pronounce Gaelic names and such, a colleague of mine said that in
> most (not all) cases, when you have a di- or trigraph spelling of a
> vowel, usually the first symbol (first two for trigraphs like aoi)
> shows the quality of the vowel, the second, the
> On Jul 30, 2008, at 8:20 AM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> > Subject:      Re: Is it Irish to be Cuil?
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > ---------
> >
> > Quite a bit more from Mark Liberman here ("Heroic feats of
> > etymology"):
> >
> > http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=420
> >
> > --Ben Zimmer
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 12:20 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Isn't that surname spelled _Mac Cumhail_ and pronounced [,mak
> >> 'kuw at l'], where _il_ [i'] represents palatalized /l/?
> >>
> >> And _cuill_ would represent a pronunciation about as close to "kweel"
> >> as to "quill," in the Munster dialect, at least. Munster isn't the
> >> basis of the standard language, but, outside of the Gaelteacht, it's
> >> the most popular dialect.
> >>
> >> The word for "knowledge" is _fiuss_, related to English _wise_, in
> >> Old
> >> Irish, yielding _fios_, as expected, in the contemporary remnant of
> >> the language.
> >>
> >> -Wilson
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 10:13 AM, Benjamin Zimmer
> >> <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 8:32 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> The "About" page for the new search engine Cuil claims "Cuil is an
> >>>> old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil."  Do you
> >>>> experts agree, or is this another instance of the class "all
> >>>> English
> >>>> words derive from Irish"?
> >>>
> >>> http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/28/technology/cuil.ap/index.htm
> >>> "Costello's Irish heritage inspired Cuil's odd name. It was derived
> >>> from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore."
> >>>
> >>> In beta-testing, it was spelled "Cuill":
> >>> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/15/cuill-secures-25m-for-next-
> >>> generation-search/
> >>>
> >>> They want us to pronounce it "cool", but "quill" would be a bit
> >>> closer
> >>> to the Irish pronunciation.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --Ben Zimmer
> >>>
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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