Gaelic Signs

The writing on the picture (above) may be uninteligible to all of you but it is in fact written on the side of an ambulance. It is written in Gaelic and all of us in Scotland have to look at this piece of nonsense every day. Police cars and fire engines as well as railway signs and many other things are emblazoned in this language. The problem is that there are probably more Scots who speak Klyngon or ancient Egyptian than speak gaelic and a parallel to this idiocy would be if the Egyptian government introduced heiroglyphic signage. In fact in all my years in Scotland I have only ever met two people who could speak gaelic and only one who claimed he could only speak gaelic. The latter was in a pub in Portree on Skye but he turned out to be sham as his English soon came to his tongue when he began chatting up two rather attractive American tourists.So whilst the world learns English, in Scotland we are being asked to learn a language which is as much use as that spoken on the planet of the Clangers. 

Incidentally, on a recent visit to Shetland I noticed that some of the road signs are written in old Norse as well as English. This of course reflects the historical link between Scandinavia and Shetland. The problem is that nobody has spoken old Norse on Shetland since the days of Noggin the Nog which makes these signs even more pointless than the gaelic ones. Having said that Shetland does have signs written in modern colloquial Shetlandese which are exceptionally apt and exceptionally amusing (see picture).