I considered trawling through previous posts on this board to find the answer but then I thought if I'm wondering about this, then there are probably many more people wondering about the same thing.

I used Abair to try to figure this out but it wasn't completely clear to my ears - as a monolingual Enlgish speaker, maybe my brain isn't trained to recognise certain sounds. The 'gh' sounded kind of like a y but not quite - it sounded like a fricative. Am I right in thinking that it is pronounced like a y but with some 'friction'?

At school, I remember hearing the sentence "Tá an ghrian ag soilsiú" - it sounded like the teacher pronounced the 'gh' either as a g or a broad 'gh' but at the time, I didn't know anything about the phonology so maybe I just heard what I expected to hear because my ears weren't capable of recognising sounds that weren't used in English. I only did Irish for the first three years of secondary school and I never heard anything about broad and slender consonants. Although phonetics / phonology (I'm not sure which is the right term to use, here) was only one of the many things I never learned in my three years of Irish classes at school. Irish phonology is the reason I am trying to learn Irish now so maybe if we had spent some time on it at school, I wouldn't have been so quick to give it up.

Is it a voiced version of the slender 'ch'?

Seo dhuit:

http://www.forvo.com/word/ghrian/#ga

Yep...pretty much.

Redwolf

, try the conamara version, the sound is a little louder and clearer.

Yep, like a y, but not quite.

Here's how you don't pronounce it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDlCM_Mwtys , listen for mo ghile.



No, your first guess is probably correct unfortunately. A lot of Irish teachers can't pronounce Irish correctly. Now, they may be excellent teachers and have an excellent command of grammar etc..., but a lot of the time they just pronounce Irish sounds using the closets sounds in English, e.g. ch as k, buachaill as bukill, lae as lay, tú as too.

So students are brought up speaking Irish incorrectly and then they pass on the same mis-pronunciations and so the cycle continues.

The same issue occurs with most learners and some neo-natives.



I agree, pronunciation needs to be explicitly taught in schools. There is a complete lack of understanding regarding Irish phonology- bordering on shear denial- and because of that lack of understanding people are under the impression that the Hiberno-English pronunciation spoken in the particular area they grew up in is a reflection of the Irish language spoken there (sometimes it does, but most of the time it doesn't); as if the ability to speak a language was an innate quality, because they are Irish .

Some people naturally get very defensive then when people attempt to correct them- because they may have spent years learning the language and rightly be very proud of their ability to speak it- but all of a sudden they are being told the way they were taught to pronounce Irish is wrong.

People also tend to mix up accent and pronunciation. But they are not the same thing, for instance a native speaker of Conamara Irish has a different accent than a Munster or Ulster speaker, yet they are all able to differentiate between broad and slender consonants, pronounce the different Rs correctly etc...



I would say be very careful though, most learning resources are polluted with the same pronunciation mistakes. Actually, if you manage to find some accurate learning resources let me know, as I haven't found any good modern ones.

The old version of Teach yourself Irish- by Dillon and Ó Cróinín- is excellent for Munster Irish, even if the teaching methodology is kind of out dated.

Here's the link to download it for free!

viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2960&p=27095&hilit=old+teach+yourself+Irish+Teach+yourself+Irish+myles+dillon#p27095

Crossed with Redwolf

Cian

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

Go raibh maith agaibh, a dhiús'ns.

It should be closer to "muh YIL-eh mahr."

Ornamenting on the whistle and in sean nós singing is pretty similar, really. Same basic idea.

Redwolf

Gilla is pronounced with a hard G, mo ghille on the other hand is pronounced the same as the gh in grian.

Actually, while we are on the subject of sean nós, I personally find it as a great way to learn Irish pronunciation and idioms.

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

If you want to be very precise, the gh of "ghille" is just like English y. But the gh of "ghrian" is different, it's like a voiced version of slender ch. It's written [ʝ] in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_fricative

(you can listen to it by clicking on the link in the up right part of the article).

Actually, a y-sound naturally becomes [ʝ] before a slender r, it's easier to pronounce.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

On this forum, I've found answers I thought I had no hope of finding. I made a thread about an being pronounced as a'. In the phrase 'Tá an ghrian ag soilsiú', would an be pronounce a-ing or something close to that? Or would it be pronounced an or ang or a'? Or is it something you should get a feel for? Should I pronounce an in the way that feels comfortable, which should hopefully be the way that native Irish speakers feel most comfortable with? Sorry if I'm asking too many stupid questions but I think it's important to get the sounds right - to preserve the sounds of the real, existing Irish language. I'd feel like I wasn't actually learning Irish if I was distorting Irish to fit into my anglophone brain (I googled whether I should capitalise anglophone and apparently it's a matter of opinion), since that wouldn't be real Irish. I don't see the point of speaking Irish if you're going to do it in an English way. I went to an Irish class recently and the teacher said that dhá was pronounced 'gaa'. In fairness, he pronounced words like 'dhubh' with a gh sound at the start. Maybe he learned early on that dhá was gaa and he couldn't let go of that. I was disappointed that he let other people in the class pronounce dhubh and dhonn as dubh and donn. I know that he knows far more than I do, but I am disappointed with the 'anything goes' attitude that I've encountered with Irish teachers. I did French at school and I encountered the same attitude so I suppose Irish teachers aren't unique in that respect. It's only recently that I've developed the confidence to go with the correct pronunciation. I used to be too embarrassed to do a French r but now I've started to see it as a letter separate to r, which has helped me get over my apprehension.