Re: Silent E

En réponse à Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>:

>
> That's why I think it's a pity the lenition dot has fallen out of use.
> Of course, that'd mean that it'd be impossible to write Irish using
> Latin-1.
>
Maybe with a dot after the consonnant? 't.' instead of 'th'. Of course, the
aesthetics wouldn't be the same.

> <snipping Christophe's excellent explaination of broad and slender
> vowels>
>
Thank you. I was not sure my explanation was correct. The little I know from
Irish comes from a little booklet of ten pages I read ten years ago, and the
webpage of Breathanach :))) .

> I'd like to add one little caveat. Where I'm from (Sligo), `How are
> you?' is `Cad e mar ata tu?' (accents not marked) (roughly `How is it
> that you are?', if anybody's interested). The caveat is in the first two
> words, `Cad e'. It's pronounced /CAdj e:/.
>
Would it be a phenomenon of liaison? The first two words being pronounced as
one, the slenderness of 'e' would take over and provoke palatalisation, though
it's not reflected in writing (presumably because in other environments, 'cad'
is pronounced with a broad 'd')? Phenomena of fast speech are usually not
reflected in writing.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr