Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

Keith Gaughan wrote:
> Stephen Mulraney wrote:
>
>> [t] does indeed correspond to [tS] in some varieties (Donegal Irish,
>> IIRC,
>> and some (?all) Scottish varieties), but this is a trait heavily
>> associated
>> with the those varieties; elsewhere in Ireland, [t] corresponds to [c]
>> or [tj]
>> (or perhaps [t_j]). Indeed, as you go from north to south through
>> Gaeldom :)
>> you successively pass through regions where the slender counterpart to
>> [t]
>> is [tS], [c], and finally [tj] or something like it (in Cork, I think,
>> but
>> Keith would know better).
>
>
> For me, I can barely detect any palatalisation down here. For instance,
> I can remember having a discussion with with a friend of mine in first
> year about the how "spideog" is pronounced. She, and she's a gaeilgeoir
> BTW, pronounced it as, as it sounded to me, [spId'o:g], whereas I
> pronounced it as [SpIdZj'og].
I assume the apostrophe is for stress rather than palatalisation? :)
Actually, I haven't paid much attention to the widening gap between
X-SAMPA and CXS - I've been using ['] as palatalisation in my mails,
or rather as a "this consonant is slender" diacritic, in broad
transcriptions. Ah, I've just noticed that the CXS varient is [;].

I'd tend to say something like [SpId;'o:g], with some kind of "palatalised"
d-sound. Whether it would be best transcribed as [d;], [d_j] or even [J\]
I know not; in fact, from something I read recently, I got the impression
that I've been misunderstanding [J\] (and [c]) for a while. I'll post a
question about this soon, but just for the moment, I might note that my
sloppy use of [J\] and [c] might be what caused BP to ask the question he
did.

I notice that you have a short [o] in "spideog", too! Sounds kind of northern;
but then, I'd class the [dZ] as being northern too.

> I couldn't hear any changes between her
> slender and broad consonants.
>
> Or maybe Irish is losing them under influence from English...
I don't think so. AFAIK (which is not very far) it's always been like that
in Cork.

I'm not sure where it is, then, that has the [tj] or something like it.
Maybe Corca Dhuibhne? I can't remember (though I was there last summer &
heard a lot of Irish).

> K.
s.
--
Stephen Mulraney        ataltane@ataltane.net        http://ataltane.net
In 1869 the waffle iron was invented for people who had wrinkled waffles.

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