Esszet wrote:
What the fuck? If you go to Abair and Fuaimeanna, silmeth, you’ll see that they use /æ/ some of the time, as you said, you must have a lot of trouble in distinguishing them.
I didn’t really even try to distinguish myself whether the recordings have [a] or [æ], as I said, I don’t trust myself in distinguishing exact vowel sounds. ;-) I just checked that they do not use the /æ/ notation for the phoneme (although – in case of abair.ie and fuaimeanna – they don’t differentiate back and front short a in the transcription at all, treating both as a single phoneme – I guess because the back variant occurs after broad consonants, front after slender ones).
The point I was trying to make was that other sources I’ve seen use /a/ for the front one and /ɑ/ for the back one (and /ɑː/ for á) – that’s the transcription in
Teach Yourself Irish from 1961, Ó Cuív’s
The Irish of West Muskerry (although I just skimmed through fragments on Google Books, would need to get a copy to see what actually is stated about them),
An Ghaeilge (which explicitly states that long á always have the back value, suggesting the same as short /ɑ/), the materials on corkirish blog (eg. dictionary there), Wikipedia (which does use /æː/, but only for Ulster long vowel) – which I find odd if the difference, in both Munster and Connacht, is in fact the one between [æ] and [a] instead.
Anyway, I’ve found a book
The Sound Structure of Modern Irish by Raymond Hickey which indeed suggests [æ] for short front /a/ and [a] for back one, but then again marks examples with [æ] as
Cois Fharraige.
I think I’ll buy
Modern Irish by Ó Siadhail to have a better source on modern dialects.

And I’ll try to listen more carefully to some Munster recordings. I
think I do hear
some difference between all /ɑː/, /ɑ/ (/a/) and /a/ (/æ/), but if you asked me, I’d say /ɑː/ sounds rounded ([ɒ]) to me, /ɑ/ unrounded ([ɑ]), /a/ more fronted ([a]), but I don’t think I hear [æ] in words like
fear,
deas,
bean (eg. in
this recording by Séamas Ó Beaglaoich)… but then, I might be completely wrong, I’m bad at vowels. And then the difference between [a] and [æ] is quite minor so it probably isn’t really worth worrying about (at least when one does
some distinction between all the
as). And then my own pronunciation is so far away from native at the moment that I probably shouldn’t worry about exact vowel values right now anyway. ;-)