Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!
| From: | Carsten Becker <naranoieati@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Sunday, February 20, 2005, 18:59 |
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Say, do you always use the "reply to all" button in your mailing program,
Stephen, or is there a deeper sense why I receive answers from you privately
as well? However, I'm not using GMail and I set my mailer to auto-reply to
the list.
On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:00:26 +0000, Stephen Mulraney
<ataltanie@...> wrote:
>Carsten Becker wrote:
>> OK, I didn't know that. Sorry.
>
>Well, maybe I was a bit hasty :). Thomas & Keith are essential
>reading on this matter...
Heh, it's not that I haven't read their answers. I have just written the
mail before I could read what Thomas and Keith wrote and then forgot to
delete this paragraph when I sent it later.
>Oh, this is in you *English* class? :). Unless your teacher is
>Irish, I wouldn't expect too much!
She's unfortunately natively German and rumors go that she hasn't even had a
year in an anglophone country -- which is actually due when studying English
for teaching.
>> "_-" means "retracted" -- does that mean I have to pull back
>> my tongue a bit?
>
>Yes, well, as I suggested, you can take the broad consonants as
>simply "plain", so that broad <c> is just /k/ rather than /k_-/.
>I decided to give a bit more detail, though, and I had a choice
>of how to transcribe it: I wanted to avoid the obvious /k_G/ since
>that's what I was trying to explain, so I described another way
>(probably implicit in the /k_G/) in which the broad <c> actually
>differs from /k/. It probably caused more confusion, though.
>Basically, the [k_-] needs to be distinguised from the [k_j],
>and if you keep that in mind, then you'll probably find a natural
>strategy for doing it. I think my own impressionistic trascription
>of what I think is going on in my own mouth might only confuse!
>But it feels to me as if my tounge is a little bit further back
>that for an English [k]. It's probably just the (in Irish,
>phonologically salient) accomodation of the [k] to the back vowel.
>(The whole point about palatalised vs non-pal. consonants is that
>a broad vowel accomodates to a back vowel, even if there's actually
>a front vowel in the environment :))
Heh, I see.
>> And what are emphatics?!
>
>Well, as I tried to describe, they're [l_e], [n_e], [r_e] as opposed
>to just [l], [n], [r], that is, they're "velarised or pharyngealised",
Hoi!
>[...]
>
>These emphatics probably aren't important.
Phew!
>You can hear Radio na Gaeltachta at
http://www.rnag.ie
>If you get the Irish version of the page, "Listen" is "Éist" (that is:
>"Eist" with an acute over the E, if the list mangles it). Alsom,
>"Éist le clar" brings you to the archive of recent programs