Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

Stephen Mulraney wrote:

> 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 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 [;].
Ditto here. I've been using it for stress too.

> 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.
Yup. Palatalisation up home seems to turn /t/ and /d/ into affricates.

>> 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).
The thing is, I'm beginning to hear those kinds of changes more and
more, like the use of [t] and [d] rather than [t_d] [d_d] for /t/ and
/d/, a loss of constrast between /k/ and /x/, the loss of [B] up in the
northwest and its replacement with a mixture of the southern [w] and
northern [v] for _mh_ and _bh_.

K.