Re: Essentialist Explaination

From: Christophe Grandsire [mailto:christophe.grandsire@FREE.FR]

> En réponse à Keith Gaughan <kgaughan@...>:
>
> >
> > Well, Cíat and Keith sound more or less alike.
>
> Well, my knowledge of Irish is not big, but according to the
> orthography I'd
> guess Cíat is [k_ji:t], while Keith is probably more [ki:T].
> They sound close
> enough, agreed :)) . Or is Irish |t| ever pronounced [T]?
The t is a dental stop, so it does sound rather similar to [T].

To be honest, most people pronounce the 'th' in in my name as
a dental stop anyway, so that's why I feel the Irish and English
variants sound more or less alike.

> > I'm a bit too
> > lazy right now to transcribe Gáibhtheacháin into IPA, but
> > it's a bit like this: gow-AHKH-aawn', the apostrophy indicating
> > palatalisation.
> >
>
> Would it be something like [gA:w"haxA:n_j]?
That's close enough. Other variants of the name are Gavaghan,
McGuigan and MacGoohan. There's a lot of others too. Gavaghan
and Gaughan are closest to the original pronouciation.

> According to what I've understood of the Irish orthography,
> that's what it hints at... Although [A] could well be
> [Q] or [O], I've never seen an IPA chart of the Irish vowels.
Nor I, but I'd say that [A] would be closest to my ear but I'd
need to record myself saying it to be sure.