Hey everyone, I came across this video from Bitesize Irish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B93V6FTIZU

And something completely blew me away. Around ~40 seconds in, he starts saying that tá is pronounced with the english 'th' sound and then proceeds to pronounce it as 'thaw'.

I've never ever heard in my life any native speaker (or dare I say learner even in the Irish school system???!) even try to pronounce it in this way.
I'm extra thrown off as he seems to have spent at least some time in probably Kerry - he starts the video off with 'atánn tú' which I've only heard from Cork and Kerry speakers.

The only explanation for this I can think of is he meant to say 'thá' (as comes up in Ring and Kerry) but possibly learnt it by reading and assumed the 'th' was a 1-1 map with the English sound as opposed to a lenited 't' sound aka an actual 'h' sound.

But before my lower jaw completely hits the floor and proceeds to make its way to Australia, I just wanted to check if there's some other part of the country where this pronunciation is acceptable?

There is also a comment and response in the same video worth looking at where Bitesize point to teanglann as proof of the 'th' sound.
And the audio (in all three dialect clips) clearly sound like the broad 't' you would expect without any English 'th' sound there.

I don't know where in that video he pronounces tá with a dental fricative. But if he does, it's wrong. He uses thaw as his transcription of tá on the screen, but I think "thaw" is meant to be interpreted in a Hiberno-English way, if you think of the number of Irishmen (possibly this is declining) who pronounce English th as a dental t.

What I most didn't like about his video is his pronunciation of "orm", with an English r in the middle. It should be the same flapped r the Spanish use in the middle of the word "pero". The BiteSize Irish channel and organisation should be nuked.

I'd agree with djwebb2021, he means th in the old Hiberno-English sense of a dental t.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

In most of this video it sounds to me like he's using an English alveolar t for tá. But he pronounces the English 'th' here:
https://youtu.be/2B93V6FTIZU?t=40


This would make more sense, and I certainly hear this used around Dublin still.


He should really call this out in the video that that's what he's going for.
I can't help but think of the countless Americans who watch that and think tá is with an english th now.

Thanks to you both for getting back to me so fast, I'll likely avoid BiteSize Irish in future now.

Wow, I only randomly sampled the video and in places he was using the Hiberno-English th, but he is flat out using standard th there. Yikes!

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

I don't like this "aw" thing either. It implies that the á is like the "aw" in the English word "law", but there is a difference between aah and aw. Tá sounds **a bit like** taw, but not quite and the height of the vowel in the mouth depends on the dialect. I've been told in Muskerry that the Corca Duíbhne á is much higher (I.e. with the mouth more open) than the Muskerry one.

From English as we Speak it in Ireland by Patrick Weston Joyce (1910), chapter 7:
"As for the English th, it may be said that the general run of the Irish people never sound it at all; for it is a very difficult sound to anyone excepting a born Englishman, and also excepting a small proportion of those born and reared on the east coast of Ireland."

The book is available on Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34251

I have read elsewhere that Bitesize Irish should not be relied upon.

There are sometimes people who speak Irish quite well, but then, when they want to explain Irish pronunciation in English, they resort to a decidedly “correct” English pronunciation: they explain long Irish vowels as if they were diphthongs (because diphthongs dominate in English); they speak broad d, t as if they were dental fricatives (i.e. "th") instead of dental plosives, etc.
Amazingly, they don't even realize it themselves, and when they actually speak Irish, the vowels are correct long monophthongs and broad t and d are dental plosives, as they should be.