silmeth wrote:
Breandán wrote:
silmeth wrote:
/a/ for
ai and
ea certainly exists in Munster. Does [æ] even exist anywhere outside Ulster? Wikipedia lists it only in charts of vowel phonemes for
Ulster, and not for
Connacht nor
Munster (EDIT: but I see words transcribed with [æ] for /a/ after palatal consonants for Cois Fharraige, eg.
here and
here, so it seems it exists as an allophone).
You should look at
Learning Irish by Mícheál Ó Siadhail and
The Irish of Iorras Aithneach County Galway by Brian Ó Curnáin instead of Wikipedia.
I asked those questions genuinely because I wanted to know the answers, because sources available to me –
An Ghaeilge by Aidan Doyle and Edmund Gussmann, abair.ie, fuaimeanna.ie, Wikipedia (of which Wikipedia is the easiest to link in a forum post) – don’t suggest any /æ/ (phonemic) or even [æ] (phonetic).
If my post sounded aggressive or dismissive, I’m sorry, didn’t intend it too, I formed it as questions in the hope of getting answers to them, not having them dismissed with titles of two books dealing with specifically Galway Irish – not very helpful, and not sure whether you intended it, but also somewhat passive-aggressively sounding answer.
I don’t have the books you mention, so can’t check them, and Wikipedia is the best resource on various dialects phonology I have at hand. And I am not that much interested in Galway Irish so won’t buy them just to check what exactly they claim about a single phoneme. So let’s try again:
In my previous post I noticed that [æ] occurs in phonetic transcription of words from Cois Fharraige and I guessed that it is realization of the phoneme /a/ (perhaps only after slender consonants? or everywhere?) – is that true?
Does [æ] exist in all dialects?
An Ghaeilge, Wikipedia, and Fuaimeanna.ie, by consistently using /a/ as the transcription of the phoneme, suggest that no – [a] is the default and probably most prevalent sound, but maybe I am reading too much into the phonemic transcription and the true realization is different. I would gladly test that myself by listening to native recordings, but, to be honest, I don’t hear the difference between [a] and [æ] that well – my native language has a very limited vowel inventory so I’m not trained in hearing it so well as English native speakers are, so I don’t trust myself here.
You very confidently claimed theas is /hæːs/ (with long vowel) and one has to say it that way to sound like a native, while
An Ghaeilge gives /has/ (with short /a/) (and I’m pretty confident in this book for Munster Irish pronunciation), as does
abair.ie for all dialects. But then, those are just phonemic transcription (not “full-blown IPA” for a phonetic one), so they might simplify the view.
I'm sorry, silmeth, my only intention is to be helpful. Your answer came across as a very verbose refutal of my post, based on a very limited set of internet resources.
If I am brusque, it is because I really don't have time nowadays to do much more than point people to the best sources. I certainly don't have time to get into great long debates.
The biggest problem with information on the internet is that it doesn't go through any real form of peer review or editing process. Most people posting about Irish cannot even speak the language properly.
The books I quoted deal with real Irish. There was also an excellent book in German on Conamara Irish with full phonetic transcription but I only receive photocopies of it back in the eighties and I don't know its title. I do remember that
ai and
ea were /æ/ in those transcriptions because they agreed well with what is given in Learning Irish.
Abair.ie is a speech emulator and while it is remarkably good for a computer, one shouldn't try to deduce native speech or phonemes from a computer program.
Wikipedia also suffers editing problems. If no one who has the relevant knowledge notices a mistake, it will stay there until someone does notice it.
Another thing I should warn you about is the danger of trying to extrapolate over the three dialects. Ulster Irish is so completely different from the other two dialects phonetically and grammatically that it could actually be treated as a separate language. There is far less variance between Conamara and Munster Irish (though human beings like to zoom in on the differences rather than the similarities.)
If you mix Ulster grammar with Conamara or Munster grammar, you will end up with a mess (although there is a bit of bridging in Mayo dialect). If you mix Conamara and Munster grammar it is no big deal as they are very similar on the whole.
Similarly, Conamara and Munster pronunciation aren't that different but Ulster pronunciation is quite different.
I checked out the pronunciation on Fuaimeanna for words where I expected /æ/, such as
ainm,
airgid,
athair, etc. They are also pronounced /æ/ in the Munster recordings even though the transcriptions use /a/. My conclusion is that the transcriptions are very sloppy on that site. They haven't indicated lengthening of vowels in the Conamara transcripts even though the speaker is lengthening them.
For example, the prefix
an- "very" should be /a:N/ in Conamara (as is pronounced that way by the speaker) but they have transcribed it as /ˈan̪ˠ./. The lengthening is deas and theas are optional (dialect specific) but since Fuaimeanna doesn't correctly indicate any lengthening, it is impossible to tell from the transcriptions.
In summary, I think the combination of poor phonetic transcription in your sources, specifically using /a/ for both /a/ and /æ/, and a difficulty distinguishing /a/ from /æ/ has led you to the incorrect conclusion that the sound is /a/ when it should be /æ/. (If it is any consolation, I have difficulty distinguishing between u and ü in German.)
As for your other questions and comments, Irish broad r is semi-rhotic, i.e., it is like an English r but also flapped. Sometimes it is hard to hear the flap but it is there (Esszet is flapping a little too hard). The Irish slender r is flapped but is light and buzzy almost like a z or zh.
I am not familiar with
An Ghaeilge. Can you please give me some more details?