Small Letters

Ah!

I was talking to an Irishwoman on the phone a few weeks ago. She was trying to tell me the name of a bus company.

It sounded like the name was "Canbess", uncertain I spelled this back to here and she heartily agreed that I was correct, and then she spelled it for me.

K R N B R T H

Hmm, I repeated this and she agreed again just as heartily that I was right.

Puzzled, I said pretend I'm a rather stupid child and please spell it more slowly.

At the same speed as she use the first time, she said K R N B R T H.

I asked here about the lack of vowels and she said that she only uses the small letters. At this point I decided that we were neither of us actually speaking English only pretending to, so I thanked her and hung up.

The phone number she gave me for the company didn't work. I think it was too short.

Asking on a message board, I was told she probably meant Kavanagh. Hmm. No explanation of what she would have meant by small letters, but I finally googled it.

Apparently the Irish language only uses 18 of our 26 letters and that is the small ones. Now there are all the vowels in it, but I did kind of always suspect that what I heard as 'R' might have been meant to be 'A'. There is no 'V' though.

Eventually I should learn how to pronounce this stuff, but probably not this week.

http://www.phouka.com/gaelic/book01/page01.htm
http://www2.evergreen.edu/ireland/making-sense-of-irish