What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

In Irish, there are both broad and slender vowels and broad and slender consonants. Whether any of these are broad or slender depends on which vowels/vowel combinations are paired with broad or slender consonant/consonant combinations and vice versa.

And people wonder why Irish is a dying language.

Boru

I quite often see opinions about Polish being hard language to learn but it is at least in one aspect far easier than English. You write "Andrzej upiekł ciasto" and you read it as "Andrzej upiekł ciasto". In English however "Andrew baked the cake" morphs into "Endrju bejk'd de kejk". Clearly Polish would be better lingua franca.

One thing that stumbles people trying to learn Irish is those letter combinations I mentioned. By way of example, ‘s’ followed by a vowel has the sound of English ‘sh’ (as in ‘shower’), but ‘s’ followed by ‘h’ has the sound of English ‘s’ (as in ‘see’).

If we ever tried to adopt Irish as a lingua franca, civilization would crumble in a fortnight.

Boru