Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On 24 Feb 2005, at 12.07 am, Keith Gaughan wrote:
>
>> 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 couldn't hear any changes between her
>> slender and broad consonants.
>
> In the IPA and derivatives, the stress marker goes *before* the
> *entire* syllable being stressed. Do you actually mean the
> syllabification is [SpIdZj.og], with the second syllable stressed, or
> do you mean ['SpIdZj.og], or [SpI'dZjog] or something else?
I meant exactly what I wrote. Stress, second syllable. Though my
Grandmother would put the stress initially, ['SpIdZog].

>> Or maybe Irish is losing them under influence from English...
>
> Sounds unlikely. English doesn't have broad and slender consonants
> true, but if English was going to influence Irish in some way, I
> would've thought the difference between 'coo' and 'Kew' would be enough
> to keep the Irish distinction alive, even if it was phonetically
> modified.
You'd be surprised. For a start, in many of the Gaeltachtai, most of the
younger generation use English rather than Irish to speak between
themselves. Watching TG4 (the Irish language TV station), you can hear
the difference between the older and younger speakers. It *hasn't*
disappeared, but it appears to be waning.

K.