Irish spelling actually makes a lot of sense if you have even a little bit of background in Irish grammar, pronunciation, and language history, but the problem is that most people don’t have any background at all in those things, so the letter choices just seem completely arbitrary. It’s truly the “Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.” of orthography.

Gaelic is confusing to English speakers because they expect the letters to have the same sounds. Mhath (good) for example is pronounced “vah”

tchotchke arla