Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

On 24 Feb 2005, at 12.07 am, Keith Gaughan wrote:

> Stephen Mulraney wrote:
>
>> [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).
>
> 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?

> 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.

--
Tristan.

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