Re: Irish Gaelic Pronunciation

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 19:37:30 -0500
Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...> wrote:

> Thanks!
> That helps a lot!
> Although actually, an additional reason i was/am looking for information
> on Irish Gaelic dialects is because a friend of mine asked me to come up
> with an Irish dialect/accent of Hebrew for him.  Not exactly a conlang,
> but definitely an unusual ConAccent - what with all the [G]s and /T/=[h]s
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).


> running around!
> Luckily his Irish ancestors came from Dublin, which doesn't seem to have
> its own Irish Gaelic dialect anymore, so i don't have to worry about

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!

> 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!

>
> -Stephen (Steg)
>  "en catalañazor / perdió almanzor / el atambor."