Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

Och a Charsten, nach tusa a tha nad bhalgaire!
(Oh, Carsten, aren't you a scoundrel!)

Gaelic isn't evil at all. It's wonderful! It brings sunshine into your day. Silly
boy! Now off into the corner with you. ;-)

> Since we're going to deal with Ireland the rest
> of this semester IIUC, I had a look at Wikipedia
> for information about the Irish orthography (or
> should I rather write áeghtdhúaekreímfbhiagh?)
LOL, but no. :-)

> and phonology. Yikes! They must be crazy.
The orthography actually makes a lot of sense and fits the language well, once you
get to know it. It's often more regular than English orthography!

Of course, I'm coming from the perspective of speaking Scottish Gaelic, not
Irish, but they are quite similar. Irish had a spelling reform in the 1940's
(1950's?) which removed a lot of silent consonants and such, but made some
things rather more difficult (IMO) in that it sometimes obscures relationships
between words due to phonological changes. Scottish Gaelic spelling is closer
to the traditional Gaelic orthography. (Also, Scottish Gaelic is phonologically
more conservative than Irish).

> Now I understand the concept behind Christophe's
> Maggel
Naw, that was just cause he's French! ;-‏þ

> and why it is thought to be a parody of (Old?)
> Irish.
Actually, while it is true that modern Gaelic orthography is more consistent than Old
Gaelic spelling, the things that strike fear into Anglophones (and others),
namely all the h-digraphs and vowel digraphs and trigraphs are a feature of
modern orthography. They explicitly indicate lenition and palatalization of
consonants, which was not indicated in Old Gaelic spelling.

> Wikipedia writes something about velar offglides and
> palatalization, but how is that realised? And how can I see
> if a consonant is palatalized or velarized?
Phonemically, the Gaelic consonants (except for H) all come in pairs: a non-palatalized
variant and a palatalized variant -- just like in (many? most?) Slavic
languages. Non-palatalized ("hard", or in traditional Gaelic terminology
"broad") consonants are preceded and/or followed by the vowels A, O, and U in
the orthography. Palatalized ("soft", or in traditional Gaelic terminology
"slender") consonants are preceded and/or followed by the vowels E and I in the
orthography.

Actual phonetic realization of the non-palatalized versus palatalized contrasts
varies from region to region and dialect to dialect, both in Ireland and
Scotland. Especially in Irish, non-palatalized consonants may be labialized or
have a labial off-glide before front vowels. Likewise, palatalized consonants
(in both varieties) may have a palatal off-glide before back vowels, or,
especially in Scottish Gaelic, may turn into affricates.

> The chart for
> the orthography always gives e.g. c = [k], [k_j], [k_G]
> without further explanation.
Very roughly (allowing of course for the great dialectal variation which exists in
all varieties of Gaelic): c = [k] when non-palatalized before back vowels or
palatalized before front vowels, [k_j] when palatalized before back vowels, and
[k_G] when non-palatalized before front vowels. And so on for most other
consonants.

> It seems the Irish orthography
> is rather ideographic than logical. Sorry to say so.
Just give yourself a bit of time to get used to it. It is in fact quite logical and
fits the language well.

There are a few basic principles to keep in mind:

1. Consonants come in non-palatalized and palatalized varieties; non-palatalized
consonants are preceded and followed by the vowels A, O, U while palatalized
consonants are preceded and followed by the vowels E, I.

2. The vowel digraphs and trigraphs you see actually indicate single vowels
preceded or follwed by consonants of different classes. In other words, one
vowel symbol in the digraph or trigraph is actually pronounced, while the
others are merely orthographic devices to indicate the palatalization or
non-palatalization of the adjacent consonants. And there are rules for which
vowels are pronounced and which are "consonant-affectors", so there is rarely
confusion.

3. The consonant digraphs (bh, dh, etc.) represent lention, which means
"softening". The sounds they represent are, in origin at least, "softened"
versions of the simple sound. For example, c = [k], ch = [x]; b = [b], bh =
[v]. The big exceptions are th and dh, which originally represented [D] and
[T], but those sounds were lost around the 13th century or so (IIRC) and fell
in with [G] and [h] respectively. F was softened right out of existence, so fh
is silent, and sh = [h] (I don't know if it always did, but that's what it is
in the modern Gaelic at least).

An interesting side note: in the traditional uncial hand (often called the
"Gaelic alphabet" or "Irish alphabet" by the uninitiated, though it's just a
variant of the Latin alphabet) used especially in Ireland, and where it was
even made into a typeface that you see in books right up until the 1950's or
so, lenition was indicated by a superscript dot instead of the letter h
following. This is originally the "punctus delens" ("deleting point") used by
medieval scribes to "erase" a mistake in copying -- a dot over a letter meant
it was a mistake and was not to be pronounced when reading the word. Since /f/
disappears when lenited, early Gaelic scribes in Ireland used this punctus
delens to indicate that it shouldn't be pronounced. Then gradually, the dot was
extended in use so that it no longer represented the deletion of a sound, but
rather the entire phonological-grammatical mechanism of which the sound change
of /f/ to nothing was a part. And so eventually it came to be use!
 d over all lenited consonants, and so to indicate lenition.

Just an interesting aside! :)

And keep working on the Gaelic -- the more time you spend with it, the more you'll like it!

Le gach deagh dhùrachd,

Tòmas

PS Also, take a look at Polish orthography -- there are some parallels in the
indication of palatalized versus non-palatalized consonants (e.g. how
consonants are palatalized before the letter I, and how that letter is thus
written but not pronounced to indicate palatalization of consonants before
other vowels). And of course, in the phonology too (the whole consonant
palatalization pair thing).