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?

There are related sandhi phenomena inside syllables, inside words and across word boundaries.

Here it is a sandhi rule across word boundaries which effects slender r´ and makes it broad when dental sounds (and r) follow (regardless whether broad or slender themselves),
as in:
"athair sin" /ahər s´ın/
"fuair sé" /fuər s´e/,
"ní foláir dúinn" /n´i: fəla:r du:ŋ´/,
"tabhair leat" /tu:r l´at/
etc.

Yes - and this is why Peadar Ua Laoghaire has athair síoraí in both the ns and gs and vs. If you see that athair síoraí is pronounced athar síoraí, and if it then becomes a fused word, athar-síoraí, then there is no lenition on the s in any case. And so the genitive is "an Athar Síoraí" (not: an Athar Shíoraí).

In documenting Corca Dhuibhne Irish, especially that of Peig Sayers, Heinrich Wagner in his phonetic transcription provides that speakers, especially across word boundaries, have a strong tendency to maintain a distinct slender r. I believe there is an online copy of Oral Literature from Dunquin, Co. Kerry in archive.org, with phonetic transcriptions of stories in Dunquin Irish (almost all of them being from Peig Sayers) there are numerous examples of slender r before dentals, and it is worth taking a look at. Of course, the Irish that Wagner documented, especially that of his Oral Literature from Dunquin has changed over time. My assumption would be that nowadays in more modern examples of Corca Dhuibhne Irish the tendency to maintain a distinct slender r before dentals has disipated and has been largely replaced by the more stantard, or, even more simply, easier to articulate, broad r among especially younger speakers.

The broad s before slender c is common in Corca Dhuibhne as well, though, of course it is not found among every speaker. The tendency to pronounce s broad before c gets progressivly more common the further West the speaker is from in the peninsula, as a general statement (see how in Wagner's Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects, he notes a broad s before slender c in Corca Dhuibhne, but generally a slender one in An Clochán). What I'm curious about is the range of the broad s before slender l phonemes. At least as far as I can recall, I haven't encountered this in Corca Dhuibhne Irish. As far as anyone is aware, does this extend outside of the Muskerry Gaeltacht?

_________________
I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar

Does that mean this is, in fact, a known feature of Muskerry Irish?

All I can offer, unfortunately, is that I know of placenames anglicised such that they would suggest a historical broad s before slender r as far east as Innishannon/Upton, where you also get "Sleaveen".

Apologies, I thought that you meant that you had heard native speakers pronounce the s broad before slender l when speaking Irish. I'm not sure if it's a feature or not, I haven't done sufficient studying of Muskerry Irish to say. What I can tell you is that broad s before slender c is definitely a feature of Irish, though the only two areas which I know it to be common are Corca Dhuibhne and certain areas of Galway.

_________________
I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar