I'll take mushrooms and listen to it for hours. And do leprechaun magic. You don't have to understand it to feel it. Gang. Sum. Characters. Music. It's laughing and joking.

Roland McHugh and Raphael Slepon give about 50 or so P/Q occurrences in their respective FW annotation projects, but neither include the actual word "PrankQuean". In fact, it hadn't occurred to me until just now. Thanks for that. Strangely, P's and Q's are at times interchangeable in certain Gaelic dialects. Add to this the "mind your p's and q's" quip, and you've given Joyce yet another pretext to distort the language, which of course was his first order of business when writing FW.

I certainly never claimed to be either, and am always happy to hear when I’ve conjured a laugh. Can you provide a phonetic spelling?

@@adamharvey2017 Soz don't mean to come off condescending or anything I was just tickled pink by it is all. Any average Irish person who by and large doesn't have any Irish will tell you something like ‘BAL-juh AW-ha KLEE-uh’. Indeed that's close to the proper pronunciation in the language itself, however as a little factoid most Irish speakers contract the name in spoken speech (five syllables is tough for a city you tend to be talking about a lot), to something like ‘blaw KLEE-uh’. You're absolutely right though about Dún Laoghaire. The Irish spelling is the official name, but people still used the Anglicised pronunciation in day-to-day speech (coming from the older Anglicised spelling Dunleary, which makes a lot more sense phonetically). An Irish speaker would pronounce Dún Laoghaire like ‘doon LEE-ruh’ or ‘doon LAY-ruh (btw if you know the IPA I can provide it for any of these). Regardless I still love the vids, I'm just beginning to embark on my Joyce journey have read A Portrait and Dubliners with the hope of tackling Ulysses next (and FW someday, maybe). I'll be sure to return to them once I get to FW!

Excellent. Gaius Valerius, you have have been pinned. It just goes to show - no matter how many times you look there's always something new to see. To illustrate Gaius' point, here's the text from all three passages with slashes to separate the corresponding fragments: p. 3: bababad / al / gharaghta / kamminarronn / konnbronn p. 98: bad / old / karakter / commonorrong / canbung p. 314: Both / all / choractors / chumminaround / gansum With the exception of the stuttering at the start of T-word #1 they all match up syllable by syllable.

Yes, with a stuttering beginning, which of course the dreamer is! 'b-b-both all characters coming around...' I'm glad to know there's another out there that heard this similarity. It cannot be a coincidence. In all the reading I've done about the thunderwords I haven't read of anybody else that has made the connection; not even the McLuhans. Is it just too obvious? Are you also a musician I wonder? I heard the similarity on my first reading many years ago and immediately went back to the first T-word and heard it as the seventh with a stutter. Brilliant.

Жаль нет русский субтитров

Your stereotypes about male academics are quite bigoted. No offense, but it's time to check your privilege a little, and begin to deconstruct the woke/feminized power structure that controls the academy at the moment

Ah, the pitfalls that await the Yank reading aloud from Finnegans Wake - no way to avoid offending at times. You’re probably right re: “Dermot,” but in my defense, the decision to pronounce it in ‘neutral American’ was informed first and foremost by the desire not to offend the native Irish ear with anything even remotely resembling a 'Stage-Irish accent', which is the best I can personally do - you surely don't want to hear that. Second, I think there’s a solid argument for even the native Irish reader to consider rounding out that ‘o’ in “be dermot.” For one thing, Joyce doesn’t capitalize it, indicating there’s more than just a name there. Another problem, should the 'Kermit' rule also apply to where Joyce anagramizes the phrase later in the passage (@ 2:25 & 4:19)? The phrases would then sound: “be redtim” and “be dim ter”. These are hard choices, man, and for better or worse, I went with the “Sesame Street” method: show them the word, pronounce it distinctly, and stay as faithful as possible to how it appears on the page - regardless of its author’s nationality.

For more on the problems of pronouncing the "Irishisms" in Finnegans Wake, you might have a look at my video on Thunderword #8. That one is BOUND to offend...

@@adamharvey2017 sorry but it's Dermot as in Kermit. Americans tend to put accents in where they are not needed when they aren't sure. One thing thing that really fcking annoys me is how they pronounce Buddha. Boodah. Truly disgraceful. Makes him sound like a pendulous single testicle dangling in the humidity. I like your reading by the way. You should check out Ronnie Drew's rendition of the song in Fs Wake. It's on the 'At home with the Dubliners" album. It's the song in the book not the popular ballad.

@@adamharvey2017 KZbin "the Dubliners. Humpty Dumpty" for that rendition I was on about. Maybe you've heard it before. Joyce's word play is fantastic and as a song .....

All hail the great Ronnie Drew - that much we can absolutely agree on. Thanks for the link.

I'm grateful Joyce was insane enough to construct it.