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Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

From:Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 22, 2005, 23:37
Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> Stephen Mulraney wrote: > >>> > <c> - [k_-] - [k_j] >>> > <g> - [g_-] - [g_j] >>> >>> "_-" means "retracted" -- does that mean I have to pull back >>> my tongue a bit? >> >> >> >> Yes, well, as I suggested, you can take the broad consonants as >> simply "plain", so that broad <c> is just /k/ rather than /k_-/. >> I decided to give a bit more detail, though, and I had a choice >> of how to transcribe it: I wanted to avoid the obvious /k_G/ since >> that's what I was trying to explain, so I described another way >> (probably implicit in the /k_G/) in which the broad <c> actually >> differs from /k/. It probably caused more confusion, though. >> Basically, the [k_-] needs to be distinguised from the [k_j], >> and if you keep that in mind, then you'll probably find a natural >> strategy for doing it. I think my own impressionistic trascription >> of what I think is going on in my own mouth might only confuse! >> But it feels to me as if my tounge is a little bit further back >> that for an English [k]. It's probably just the (in Irish, >> phonologically salient) accomodation of the [k] to the back vowel. >> (The whole point about palatalised vs non-pal. consonants is that >> a broad vowel accomodates to a back vowel, even if there's actually >> a front vowel in the environment :))
Aargh, I've systematically reversed [] and // in the above, and indeed in all my recent posts :). For some reason I do this every now and again, despite knowing well enough what the right usage is... In any case, I was making the phonemic/phonetic distinction pretty much on the fly and without a lot of thought in the above. This is irrelevant to BP's question, though -
> In Icelandic there is simply a distinction between /k/--/c/ and > /g/--/J\/(*) and I always assumed the Irish distinction was the > same(**). Not so?
No - actually [c] is a realisation of the /t'/ phoneme (the slender or soft or palatalised /t/), and the distinction between broad and narrow /k/ is made in the dorsal zone. I guess Irish has to be a bit stricter in finding "palatalised" (really, front-vowel-accomdated) counterparts of plain consonants since it needs to find such a counterpart for nearly every consonant, while Icelandic has more gaps in the correspondence (or does it?).
> (*) In Icelandic /c/ and /J\/ can occur before any vowel, while > /k/ and /g/ occur only before back vowels, so a phonemic analysis > where [c] before back vowels is /kj/ may be possible. > (**) Icelandic also has a /t/--/tj/ (with /tj/ being [ts\] or > [tC], analogous to, thought I, /t/ [t]--/t;/ [tS] in Irish.
[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). s. -- Stephen Mulraney ataltane@ataltane.net http://ataltane.net In 1869 the waffle iron was invented for people who had wrinkled waffles.
> > -- > > /BP 8^)> > -- > Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se > > Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant! > (Tacitus) > >

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Kinetic <kinetic_wab@...>New member greets list :-)
Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>