[dmoo]

the Taoiseach (prime minister) is pronounced something like "Teshar" (with a kind of 'gutural' r at the end)

Try tee-shock and you will be pretty close to the standard.

[rpm4321]

Wow, Gaelic has to be one of the most unintuitive languages in the world to pronounce.

I've read that word probably a hundred times in various news articles, and always pronounced it in my head as Tao-Seech, which I'm assuming is ridiculous to Irish ears.

I'm a bit interested in Irish culture so I've informally learned some pronunciations here and there to see if I could start to get a handle on Gaelic words: the only pattern seems to be that I'm always wrong :)

[dmoo]

I'm Irish so I guess we just understand that you just forget what you know about how things are pronounced in English and go from there.

You could try http://www.forvo.com/languages/ga/

[Kudos]

The H on the end confuses people because it's usually not really a H, it's a modernisation of the séimhiú.

I can't find any decent articles on it, but basically it used to be represented by a dot over the letter it was affecting. Unfortunately I'm not good on the recent history of the language, but the change was made some time in the last 40 years (between my parents attending school and me attending school).

The reason we have so many vowels is to match broad vowels (A, O, and U) and slender vowels (I and E) across consonants. I'm fairly sure this was a change introduced in recent history too.