Re: Silent E
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Friday, October 5, 2001, 7:35 |
|---|
En réponse à Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>:
>
> Irish gets a bad rap for that sort of thing, but to a certain extent,
> it's undeserved. To be honest, it's really just a throwback to the way
> Irish was spelt before the spelling reforms forty years ago. To be
> honest, Scots Gaelic suffers from the problem far more, and then there's
> English... ;-)
>
> One of the the things that frightens people is eclipsis. Sometimes one
> sees impossible consonant combinations at the start of words like `bp',
> `mb', `gc', `nd', `bhf', `ng' and `dt'. These are historically (usually)
> due to the word proceeding it loosing a nasal consonant and having that
> consonant's nasal quality fall onto the word following it. They're not
> hard to pronounce and the pattern is awfully predictable. This table
> shows how they're pronounced:
>
> Consonant | Eclipsed Form | Sound
> ----------+----------------------
> p | bp | b
> b | mb | m
> c | gc | g
> d | nd | n
> f | bhf | w
> g | ng | n
> t | dt | d
>
> So, there's a good reason behind the extra consonants staying there.
>
Yep. They add the letter that shows the new sound, but they keep the letter
before eclipsis so that you can still recognize which word you're talking
about. I find that neat, and it makes words easier to recognize than in Welsh
or Breton.
> Now for Lenition. I can't recall the historical reason for this feature,
> so somebody can jump in and remind me if they feel like it (hint,
> hint...) Here's the sound changes anyway:
>
> Consonant | Lenited Form | Sounds Like
> ----------+--------------+------------------
> b | bh | w
> c | ch | ch (ich-laut)
> d | dh (broad) | `voiced' ich-laut
> | dh (slender) | y or silent at
> | | the end of a word
> f | fh | silent
> g | gh (broad) | (same as `d')
> m | mh | w
> p | ph | f
> s | sh | h
> t | th | h or silent at
> | | the end of a word
>
> Years ago, a dot would be placed above a lenited consonant to indicate
> that it was lenited. Nowadays, an extra `h' is used instead because that
> letter is not strictly part of the Irish alphabet.
>
The only difficult thing is that the digraphs that it makes have usually
different values for foreigner eyes. For instance, the 'th' will evocate a /T/
for English people, while it's a /h/ in Irish. And I'm not talking about 'dh'
and 'ch' :) . The system itself is simple, but unusual, and it throws back off
foreigners : .
> This sort of thing (eclipsis and lenition) has the advantage of not
> obscuring the root word by changing letters like Welsh does. I prefer
> this though it frightens people away from the language.
>
Me too. At least, you this way you can always find a word in the dictionnary
without wondering: "hey, it might be a mutated form, but from what?"
> Now for the really frightening thing: broad and slender consonants.
> These occur in all the celtic languages, they're just more obvious in
> the various forms of Gaelic. I really don't feel like explaining this
> right now because it's 5am and I'm tired. If somebody hasn't explained
> it by tomorrow morning, I'll post something up. I can just here my
> national school teacher saying `Leathan le Leathan, Caol le Caol'...
>
In my memory, broad consonnants are just pronounced normally, while slender
consonnants are palatalised (IIRC). But of course, palatalisation has produced
sound changes and some broad-slender couples are not completely transparent
(IIRC, the slender pronunciation of 's' is /h/, and broad 'l' is velarized,
while slender 'l' is just a plain /l/). Each consonnant can be broad (non-
palatalized) or slender (palatalized). Now in Irish the orthography shows it
without ambiguity, but with a strange system, since it's vowels which mark
broadness and slenderness for consonnants! In short, Irish orthography states
that the vowels a, o and u are broad, while i and e are slender. A broad
consonnant must have only broad vowels touching it, while a slender consonnant
must have only slender vowels touching it. But in speech, any vowel can occur
with broad and slender consonnants. To reconcile those two facts, Irish is
obliged to use di- or trigraphs to mark simple vowels, depending whether the
consonnants around it are broad or slender. So each vowel sound has up to four
ways to be written. For instance, IIRC, /a/ is simply written 'a' when both
consonnants around it are broad. But if the previous consonnant is broad and
the next one is slender, /a/ must be written 'ai' (since a slender consonnant
can only have a slender vowel touching it), and /a/ between two slender
consonnants is written 'eai' (or 'iai', I don't remember exactly). Some
digraphs are quite strange: /e/ between two broad consonnants is written 'ao'.
You just have to learn the possible digraphs and trigraphs (put them in a
table, it's easier), at least the system is unambiguous. For instance, in the
example you give, I can tell that in 'Leathan', 'l' is slender, 'th' and 'n'
are broad. The second vowel is /a/, but I'm not sure whether the first vowel
is /a/ or /e/ because I don't remember this digraph. In the second word 'Caol',
I know that 'c' and 'l' are both broad and the vowel is /e/. Just learn :) .
I'll look at them :) .
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr