Re: Virus Translation Exercise

From: Y.Penzev [mailto:isaacp@UKR.NET]

> Shalom, Stephen!
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...>
> To: <CONLANG@...>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 8:53 PM
> Subject: Re: Virus Translation Exercise
>
>
> > (skipped)
> >
> > gaune for ghaune: dictionary form is gaune, but is affected by
> >   lenition/seimhiú after the posessive 'sfae'. Not sure if this
> >   is ungrammatical yet, or simply the wrong meaning. e.g. Irish
> >   distinguises between 'his' and 'her' by presence or absence of
> >   lenition following the possessive: 'a mhadra' /A wAdrA/ his dog,
> >   'a madra' /a mAdrA/ her dog.
>
> Waah, thnx Heaven, I've found smbody who knows how to
> represent Irish with IPA (or SAMPA)!! Can you send me the rules of
> reading Irish (may be done off-list, my e-mail is isaacp@ukr.net )?
> I found NORAID site with a very good Irish primer, but the
> pronounciation is explained through English approximate spelling,
> so it only confuses...
Well, there's a few of us here who can. My dialect of Irish is,
according to some Cork people I know, like the bastard child of
the Ulster dialect and the Connacht dialect, being from Sligo and
all. My pronounciations, just to give you an idea of how different
they are from Stephen's east coast `standard' dialect, for them
would be /a wAdr@/ and /a mAdr@/.

Grammatically, my Irish is good. My big problem is that I've never
been able to build up any vocabulary 'cause so few people speak the
language up in Sligo. Doh!

As far as good pronunciation guides go, get an
Irish-English/English-Irish dictionary from An Gúm (just copy that
into Google and you should get their address). My copy uses a
system that maps directly onto the IPA. It's a good indicator of
the `official' pronunciation, which is good enough for most purposes.

K.