Re: Silent E

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>
> En r=E9ponse =E0 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.
And it'd scare people even more than the `h'.

> > <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 :))) .
No, it was pretty accurate. I wouldn't worry about its accuracy.

> > 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 tw=
> o
> > 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.
It's primarily a dialectic thing. When I came down here to Cork, I got strange
looks from people because I called the department webserver (called `spideog')
/spIdZo:g/ rather than /spIdo:g/...

K.

--
Keith Gaughan                         In the land of the blind, the
kmgaughan@eircom.net                    one-eyed man is a heretic
http://www.geocities.com/keithgaughan/ [Temporarily]