Re: Irish Gaelic Pronunciation

On Fri, 14 Feb 2003 01:34:37 +0000 Stephen Mulraney
<ataltanie@...> writes:
> Well, /T/=[h] in the sense only that the digraph {th} is pronounced
> [h].
> It's a little bit less arbitrary than that, though, since (all?
> most?)
> {th}s are the lenited form of {t}=[t] (dental), and lenition
> typically
> maps stops onto the homorganic fricative with the same voicedness
> (as in
> [p]->[f], [b]->[v], etc). Maybe this means that in the older
> language,
> {th}s were [T]. I expect anyway that some of the other
> irregularities
> in the lenition map were once regular (e.g. {d}->{dh} is [d_t]->[G]
> or
> or [j]. Looks even more likely when I pick *that* example: the
> voiced
> counterpart of {t} being odd under lenition too. Most suspicious).
-

According to a website i found about Old Irish
(http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/old-irish/labhairt.html), lenited /t/ and /d/
were originally /T/ and /D/.  What i'm trying to do is sort of map
more-or-less Classical Hebrew onto Old Irish, and then look at how it
comes out in Modern Irish, to approximate how Irish sound-shifts would
have affected the Hebrew pronunciation there if there had been a stable
native Irish Jewish community for the past thousand years or so.

> Well, Dublin *is* the home of the Civil Service which dreamed up the
> Caighdean Ofigui'l - the official standard Irish language (which is,
> I suppose, a necessary thing to do, since Irish is the only official
> language of the country). Certainly, no one speaks Irish like that
> natively. I'd have to call it a condialect :). That's nice: The
> Republic's official lang is a conlang!
-

Heh :-)

> > being faithful to the exact phonetics of any specific dialect when
> > i go
> > to map the Irish sounds onto Hebrew.
> I'd love to hear this. I hope you're not leaving out the two series
> of
> consonants, palatalised & unpalatalised! These are essential
> ingredients of the sound of Gaelic languages!
-

Well, i'm not going to go all out with the palatalized and unpalatalized
consonants.  Since i want to create an Irish conpronunciation of Hebrew,
and not a Irish-Hebrew hybrid conlang, i think i'll just borrow the
sounds i need from whichever series they're found in.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "Send [that god] to me that he might be my husband,
  That he might lodge with me...
  If [you don't] send t[hat] god,
  According [to the ordinances of Irkall]a and the great underworld,
  I shall send up the dead that they might devour the living,
  I shall make the dead more numerous than the living."
     ~ ereshkigal, sumero-akkadian goddess of the netherworld,
       'myth of nergal and ereshkigal'