Ok, thanks to everyone for the replies. Sounds like LI is the way to go.

My reasons for not liking LI's non-standard spelling are that it's going to bite me later when I move on to reading novels or try to look up the words in a dictionary, and it looks arbitrary and unnecessary. If having to learn that "oiche" is pronounced "í" in Cois Fharraige is fine, then I don't see why LI invents a new spelling for "urlár" instead of just saying "here it's pronounced orlár". Not a show stopper though, just annoying.

For the non-standard pronunciation symbols, my gripe is that the system he invented doesn't seem very good. He uses /b´i:/ and /w´i:/ and /s´i:/ for the sounds bwee, vee, and shee (buí, bhí, sí), so the tick mark doesn't actually give phonetic information, it just means "something funny happens here", which kinda defeats the purpose of a phonetic system. (He could have used IPA, "buí" would be /bˠiː/ or he could have invented a better system and maybe used /bwi:/ and /vi:/ and /shi:/ )

As for native speakers in Brussels, the ones here surely all work for the EU institutions and are well paid. There's no student population where you find people happy to do casual work for beer money. That said, there might be some Irish speakers here motivated by spreading the language rather than cash, so maybe trying to set up an Irish language club here could work. Not sure where to start but I'll keep it in mind.

Thanks again for the replies!

Depends. Ó Dónaill includes many nonstandard spellings with cross-references to CO forms. (Feilméara is listed, for instance.) And, just as it isn't unusual to find colloquial respellings like the ones I gave for English in literary works, it's not unusual to find these in Irish either. Ó Siadhail's book actually came in handy recently when I attempted Mac Amhlaigh's Dialann Deoraí, a Connemara writer, and--to a lesser extent--with Ó Flaithbheartaigh, who writes in a Arann dialect that shares several isoglosses with Connemara.


I think you've still misunderstanding the difference between a phonetic system and a phonological one. The tick mark indicates palatalisation; /b´i:/ isn't pronounced "bwee"--you're thinking of /bi:/ (buí). /b´i:/ is [bʲiː].


I personally don't see how that's a "better system". In particular, the forward slashes are misleading because you're no longer dealing with phonological representations.

In Learning Irish, Ó Siadhail uses dialectal spellings for some words, and standard ones for others, even when the pronunciation is very different. I don't know how he made his choices. It would be more logical to use only dialectal spellings or only standard spellings...

When I bought Learning Irish (20 years ago, it was my 1st book to learn Irish), sometimes I wonder if there weren't typos in the phonological transcription, because sometimes you see no similarity at all between the spelling and the pronunciation, especially when the author used standard spellings - I remember I was puzzled when I saw that "do" (preposition) was pronounced /gə/ or "uaithi" like /woː/ pr "uathu" like /woːb/...

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

Could he have taken his cue from Ó Dónaill et al.? I haven't looked to see which of his dialectal spellings pop up in standard references works and which don't, but it would make a certain sense to limit oneself to those which also occur elsewhere.

If you mean I'm wrong to call it a phonetic transcription, then the reason is that I'm copying what Ó Siadhail calls it.

But if you're saying I'm missing the system's great utility because I'm using it wrong (i.e. I'm trying to use it as a phonetic system when it's actually a phonological system), then you could be right. The book's explanation doesn't really say how to use it or what the benefits are over systems like IPA. Maybe I'll discover the system's utility as I go through the book.

(And yes, I mixed up bí and buí in one of my examples.)

Presumably he's simplifying matters for a general audience. It's identical the system used in his Modern Irish, where he very clearly describes it as an abstract underlying phonological representation.


I have to agree with you on that point. I similarly found the transcription bewildering at first since, though it obviously wasn't strict IPA, it also wasn't entirely clear to me what it might be instead. (I also had the issue that my other primary text, Teach Yourself Irish, both made use of broad IPA and took as its basis an entirely different dialect.)

As for the utility of the system, I think its chief merit is indicating the divergence between the CO spelling and the Cois Fhairrge pronunciation in cases where (for whatever reason) he decides not to respell the word in a nonstandard fashion. Phonetic transcription in a language learning work is really a crutch anyway and the goal should be, as much as possible, to associate the pronunciation directly with its usual orthographical representation.

I agree. I don't understand why there's so much focus on this system at all when included in the course are recordings of native speakers saying everything. What else do you need? I've been deliberately ignoring the transcriptions and I find that the actual orthography is making more and more sense.

Perhaps you could also gain contact with Irish speakers through the local GAA branch, I know there is definitely one in Brussels.
Conradh na Gaeilge might also be able to help.

I'll be joining the GAA football training in February when the new season starts.

Conradh na Gaeilge lists a conversation group in Brussels, but it's one hour a month and I wouldn't be able to get there.

It's not a big deal. I'll probably mostly ignore it, like most people seem to. The amount of complaints it draws could be because it's one of the first things presented to the reader and it doesn't make much sense. When someone's planning on spending a year working through a book, it kinda tarnishes the first impressions.

The main use I've had for phonetic transcriptions is to verify whether two similar sounding noises in the recordings are the same or different. (And if they use IPA then I can verify if the sound I heard is the same or different to a sound I know from English or another language.)