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Gaelic only has 18 letters (and W isn't one of them) but the vowels have diacritics - grave accents - that mark them as being longer.

This makes some things a bit of a nightmare because words can have different meanings based on those sounds, and that can drastically alter things. "Fèis" - "faaysh" - means "festival", "feis" with a short vowel is not a word you'd use in polite company.

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Some of the letter combinations (at least in Irish) can be represented by another Roman letter. Like mh can be represented by v. One short showing how funny this can be is: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1EBnFqRKZ7A

Also in Irish Gaelic they use the acute accent rather than grave accent - both languages used to use both of them, for slightly different lengths of long vowels, but we got rid of that in the early 80s.

The whole consonant-h fricative thing is only marginally easier to explain than German noun genders, but yeah if you see a b, m, or n followed by an h then it sounds kind of a v, although the only one that *actually* sounds like a V in English is "bh", like in "telebhisean", which sounds pretty much like it does in English.

I think you mean Scottish Gaelic. Or maybe Irish.

"W" is alive and well in Manx Gaelic.

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