Re: Gaelic pronunciations and Albaphiles!
Sorry, my no wrong pronunciation thing was a bit vague...
What I meant was that rules of pronunciation, just like syntax, morphology etc should be DEscriptive, not PREscriptive.
As far as soft "c" words...I'm not sure (and don't have time to check) the origins of these but you have...
"cedar"
"cede"
"Ceiling"
"cell"
"celebrate!"
"celerity"
"celestial"
"cellar"
Among others, and not including names (like "Celine", "Celia" etc)
Of course you also have:
Ceilidh
Or to really confuse things...
Cello.
Thing is, in a Gaelic (or Celtic..
) pronunciation, the hard "k" is probably right...but virtually no-one in Scotland speaks Gaelic (as discussed elsewhere), most speak Scots and / or SSE. So, for 99% of Scottish speakers, the word "Celtic" is borrowed into their language / dialect FROM Gaelic. While loan words normally retain some of the phonology / morphology of their original language, they can be "corrupted"...as I suppose has happened here.
But trust me, Celtic FC, from Glasgow, play at Parkhead, green and white strip, rivals with Rangers, is pronounced with a soft c.
VB.
PS - I'm from Edinburgh.