Reading through Diarmuid Ó Sé Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne I came across the following example on page 378:



In his phonetic transcription he uses<'> to indicate primary stress, equal stress on two different phonemes, or stress shifting onto a phoneme where it might not otherwise be expected based on other dialects. He uses <’> to indicate that the previous consonant is palatalised/slender.

What interested me was his transcription of a n-athair, ə 'nahər, with no palatalisation marked on the final r. Suspecting this was a mistake, I checked page 10 where he discusses his phonetic notation, and found the following:



He makes no mention in this section about r’, though he certainly does use it throughout the book.

On the next page he discusses the sound system and makes the following statement:



Admittedly, I'm not entirely sure what he means by this. Is he saying there are two forms of palatal r’ used, one of which is a fricative allophone of the other, both of which are separate from non-palatal (broad) r? Or, is he saying that palatal r’ is a fricative allophone of non-palatal r, which is more of a tap?

More to the point, however, if it is the latter, then why is he calling one an allophone of the other? I would take this to mean that neither realisation of the phoneme represented by the letter r contribute to distinctions of meaning. I am aware that many younger speakers of Munster Irish today have a tendency to drop palatal r’, in favour of broad r, but Ó Sé says on page 7 that the native speaker who provided the example above, a n-athair, is Eoghan Ó Catháin, who was born before 1920. I wouldn't have expected conflation of broad and slender r this early in Munster Irish.

So, was the phonetic transcription incorrect, or am I misunderstanding something else here?

Well, the Irish of West Muskerry shows a list of combinations where the consonant is unexpectedly broad. R is always broad before slender s. In pronunciation, I mean, not in the spelling. It is possible this largely was based on Amhlaoibh Ó Loingsigh's Irish and there may have been more variation among speakers, but in eg "do labhair sé", the r is broad. It is pronunced "do labhar sé".

Ó Cuív states in IWM (§§47, 48) that /r/ resists palatalisation in /rdʹ/, /rtʹ/, /rnʹ/, /rhnʹ/, /rlʹ/, /rhlʹ/ and /rʃ/.

It had never occurred to me that these rules would cross word boundaries, but actually, that's probably it. Thanks.

I could not remember, but I wrote this already in my grammar:


(transl.: In the endings -cht, -rd, -rn, -rt (and the syllable-spanning combinations -rl-, -rs-) the first sound is always broad.)

Ok, so it presumably can jump word boundaries too. Good to know.



I took a look at this, and a related question occurred to me. Ó Cuív doesn't list /sl’/ and /sc’/ as combinations where the previous letter is unaffected by the palatalisation of the following. But I've always heard combinations like sliabh and scéal pronounced with both broad and slender s by local speakers. Broad s in such combinations also gets anglicised in placenames like "Sleaveen", i.e. sléibhín, which are very common around South and West Cork. Is this not the case?