Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

Thomas Leigh wrote:


We seem to have been writing essentially the same response to Carsten's mail at the same time. At
least, when I sent my response and read yours, apart from the focus on Gaelic rather than Irish,
you seemed to mirror my comments almost one for one :)


>>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!

Indeed, but that's not saying a lot! :)
>
> 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,
In the 40's, I think. An example is the word for "beach": <trágh> became <trá>.
<gh> at the end of
a word after a broad vowel is rather hard to hear.


> 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).

Interesting you should say that. I would have described S. Gaelic as being less
conservative, at least
when it comes to what are surely phonological innovations like the lack of voiced stops, and the
pre-aspiration feature. Then again, Irish has the úrú (nasal mutation) where I don't think
SG does.

But certainly the spelling of SG is more conservative-looking.

>>Now I understand the concept behind Christophe's
>>Maggel
> Naw, that was just cause he's French! ;-‏þ
And as I've tried to establish a number of times on this list, Irish & Gaelic orthography is *not*
Maggelanious (?sp), rather Etabnanious (?sp). That is, relatively consistant, but complex, rather
than perversely unpredictable :).


>>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.
Old Irish (is Old Gaelic then a slightly later version of OI used in Alba?)[*] is
a nightmare to try
to pronounce, since as you say there are no clues about what phonological
processes a particular letter
might have undergone. However, at least on some OI, there was the _punctum delens_
or seimhiú, that you
mention below, used to indicate lenition. It's still used on the old-style Irish script (still seen
in decorative uses, and also on old street signs here in Dublin).

[*] Old Irish is a pretty unsatisfactory name for the ancestor of Gae[dh]ilge,
Gàidhlig and Gaelg. It's
very hard to get away from the implication that the other two are somehow an
offshoot of Irish. Which
they are, in the sense that the ancestor-language originated on the island of
Ireland, but isn't very
linguistically satisfying...


>>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.
Most, I think. I think it doesn't happen in one South Slavic lang, but I forget
which one. Exactly how
the hard/soft correspondences works in each can be interesting and quite involved. For example, in
Polish, there's a third category, 'hardened' or 'historically soft'; basically (I
think) the softened
consonants at some stage started behaving phonologically hard, and the softening process
happened again,
giving a new generation of soft consonants (example: <s> <sz> <ś> (hard, hardened,
soft) = [s_d] [s`] [s\]).


> Likewise, palatalized
 > consonants (in both varieties) may have a palatal off-glide before back
vowels, or, especially in
 > Scottish Gaelic, may turn into affricates.

Indeed, in the SG-like Ulster dialects (basically Donegal), we have affricates, e.g.
[tS] for soft <s>.



>
> 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.
An excellent description of something that I omitted to mention! Meaning, that
broad consonants before
broad vowels sound plain, and slender consonants before slender vowels sound plain, because the
palatalisation (or lack of it) occurs naturally by accomodation in those situations...



> 3. The consonant digraphs (bh, dh, etc.) represent lention, which means "softening".
But I should add that it's nothing to do with the hard vs. soft (i.e. broad/narrow) distinction
you used above :).

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.

I should say that the perhaps surprising values I mentioned for <th>, that it's
0 intervocalically, is
a peculiarity of the Cois Fharraige dialect, not of Irish in general. I talked
about that (fairly odd!)
dialect because it's the one documented in Mícheal Ó Siadhail's "Learning Irish",
which IMHO is one of
the best language-learning texts I've ever used. In fact, I'd say it's the best,
but it seems like quite
a strong claim. (Non linguovoric users might find it tough going, but I liked
its linguistic informedness
and [modified] IPA use. Some editions have yucky fonts, though :()



> 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).
Yes, it's a bit strange, isn't it? Always remind me of how Latin s- is cognate to
Greek h- (super, hyper, etc).


> Also, take a look at Polish orthography -- there are some parallels in the
> indication of palatalized versu
> s non-palatalized consonants (e.g. how consonants are palataalized before the
> letter I, and how that letter
> is thus written but not pronounced to indicate palatalization of consonants before other vowels).
Yes, it's quite like that! Except Polish uses only <i> before another vowel as a
"consonant modifier", while
our languages use a number of different vowel symbols before and after consonant groups.

Wow! Third post today. I think I've only ever reached five once before (except in
the old pre-limit days :)).


s.
--
Stephen Mulraney  ataltane@ataltane.net  http://ataltane.net
This post brought to you  by the letter 3 and the number 0xF