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It is a great pity that Irish was not included among the modern European languages considered in the Seymour/Aro/Erskine study of literacy acquisition times that Mark referred to on Saturday. Jim McCloskey once showed me the spelling of the word meaning "will get". It is spelled bhfaighidh. The word is a monosyllable, pronounced roughly like English we (or wee or Wii, or French oui). One craves to know how Irish would fare on Seymour et al.'s shallow/deep and simple/complex dimensions, and whether it might force English to settle for the silver in the European awful spelling system championships.

[Added later: Anyone skeptical of the value of comments to blog posts — and I have certainly been among the skeptics some days — might want to glance at the astonishingly erudite and generally very sensible and relevant comments below, from a variety of people who (unlike me) know something about the Goidelic Celtic languages. They are enough to restore your faith in the whole comments genre.]

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