Less sat in front of the library computer. The keyboard was filthy. The keys had a build-up of grease and dirt and between them it was a forest of hairs, skin flakes, and food. The mouse was not much better. He wasn’t comfortable with computers but he’d done Google searches before with some success. Pushing his reluctance aside, he tapped in some search terms for the pronunciation of Irish Gaelic. He had decided to start with Irish because most of the old faerie tales had originated there. He scanned the list of results and decided on a “Beginner’s Guide”.

He sighed as he scrolled down through the tables of pronounced letters. The vowels and consonants weren’t too bad, even with the accents. But then he came across further tables. Consonants could be broad, slender, aspirated, and eclipsed. Long and short diphthongs. What was with all the H’s? Ah, it’s not a letter; it is how they show the aspiration. He tried to match up the syllables with what he knew of the mysterious uh-face do.

The first syllable could be an ‘a’ as in ago or ‘u’ as in muck. The strange f sound was tougher. ‘F’ seemed to be pronounced as in English but it wasn’t really an ‘f’. ‘fh’ was silent in Irish, ‘ph’ was like ‘f’ in English again. Could it be ‘ch’ as in ”loch”? He wasn’t sure.

Armed with this shaky and amaturish knowledge of Irish, he called up a web page containing an Irish-to-English dictionary. He started with ”do” since it was short and seemed like a word of its own. It could mean Your or Two depending if the vowel was long or short. Next, he scrolled through the A’s. The closest thing was afach which meant however. Probably not. He tried the U’s. Again, there was nothing with an ‘f’ sound following. The closest thing was uafas which meant terror. ‘Your terror.’ It was plausible, he supposed, but he figured he was over his head. He would need to find a native speaker of the various Celtic languages and say it as he heard it in his dream to get anywhere concrete.