The Language of World Domination...

I saw Ken Loach's excellent film The Wind that Shakes the Barley last night, which I highly recommend. There was a song in the film that a group of republican soldiers were singing as they walked through the mist or fog on their way to an ambush which was also used in the final credits. The tune was vaguely familiar and the words were in, I assumed, Irish Gaelic, though a few of them sounded recognizable as English words. The song got into my head, so when I got home I started searching on the Internet and found out this was the song in question:

Óró, Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile

I also found it written as:

Ó Ró Sé Do Bheata Bhaile
Óró, 's É Do Bheatha 'Bhaile
Oro Se Do Bheatha Abhaile
Oró sea de bheatha bhaile

And so on and so forth, etc. Anyone care to try pronouncing that?

Now, I understand there are often different ways of transcribing a language into a non-native alphabet, what with varying dialects/pronunciations etc., and it can take time and effort to get there, but if you are going to adopt that non-native alphabet (whether voluntarily or by conquest), get there you should. All of the Germanic languages that once used runic scripts now use the Latin or Roman alphabet, (Icelandic excluded, they're doing their own thing). It probably took a while for those languages to be, if not understood by others, at least legible to others. Which brings me to my point. In the way that the Welsh never got anywhere because of their ridiculous coracles, the Irish were never really able to dominate the world in any way, because they were entirely incomprehensible. Sure the language has a nice lilt to it and it looks cool and I'll even go so far as to say it's useful...if it's a secret code and you don't want anyone to be able to understand a bleeding thing you've written. Or even have a clue where to begin to figure out how to understand a bleeding thing you've written. And so:


Dear Ireland,

Orthographic reform. It's time.

Sincerely,

TOGM

P.S. We'll even let you have funny symbols over and around your letters like the Swedes and the Vietnamese.