Say that again...?

I had to go down to Inverurie Railway Station this afternoon to pick up some advance tickets I'd ordered online for a trip at the end of this month.

While there, I noticed that the signs on the platforms had recently been replaced with ones of the new standard Scotrail design: a typeface I don't much care for, but - more interestingly - the place name in Gaelic as well as the traditional 'English' version.

Many present-day place names in Scotland - particularly in the north - are 'Anglicised' versions of the original Gaelic names. The Gaelic names often have a particular meaning - Inbhir Uaraidh, for instance, means 'the end of the river Uaraidh' - the 'Ury' as it is commonly known nowadays - which tips into a larger river, the Deathan or 'Don' at the south eastern end of the town. This kind of meaning is often far less apparent in the Anglicised version of place names.

Also, once you're familiar with the spelling and pronunciation rules - including the 'silent' letters - of Scottish Gaelic, the Gaelic version of the name often gives a far clearer idea of how the name is actually pronounced than the often rather inconsistent Anglicised versions of the place name.

I had similar thoughts throughout my trip to India last year: the Devanagari Script is highly phonetic, and once I'd got a basic grasp of that, once again, the pronunciation of words and place names became much clearer than they did from the 'English' transliterations.