Moderator:kevin
DelBoy wrote:I've never heard scanradh pronounced as scamhradh.... I suppose it's pronounced this way by the people who pronounce mná as mrá and cnoc as croc though.
DelBoy wrote:(Should we move this to the Irish forum if we want to continue and leave the Welsh folk alone? I'm sure they have better things to be discussing than Irish orthography.)
You're not helping your case that Irish spelling is regular by telling me that sometimes consonants disappear for no reason and there's no way to tell when this happens. Comparing it to English isn't helping either.No it doesn't, it looks like /'foːr/. Medial /v/ just isn't very stable in Irish.
No, I'm talking about how /a/ appear to become /au/ before /n/. Is that the rule?I guess I'm not approaching it the same way. Assimilation of /n/ to /r/ is really common crosslinguistically, so I wasn't surprised to find that this is a minor rule in Irish and I don't have trouble remembering it.
Nope. I'm asking if /ab/ ever became /aw/. I think I recall reading something about that in Spanish, but it was so long ago that I can't remember.Did what happen? I think the usual assumption is that /b/ lenited first to [β] and that [v] is a secondary development, if that's what you mean.
Nope. I'm asking if /ab/ ever became /aw/. I think I recall reading something about that in Spanish, but it was so long ago that I can't remember.
Chekhov wrote:You're not helping your case that Irish spelling is regular by telling me that sometimes consonants disappear for no reason and there's no way to tell when this happens. Comparing it to English isn't helping either.No it doesn't, it looks like /'foːr/. Medial /v/ just isn't very stable in Irish.
Chekhov wrote:No, I'm talking about how /a/ appear to become /au/ before /n/. Is that the rule?
Chekhov wrote:I'm asking if /ab/ ever became /aw/. I think I recall reading something about that in Spanish, but it was so long ago that I can't remember.
Chekhov wrote:Nope, I meant what I meant. I know that Latin /b/ became /v/ in some cases, and reverted to /b/ in Spanish. I also know that /w/ became /v/ in others. What I'm asking for are examples of /v/ turning into /w/, because Linguoboy claims this is a common change, but I can't think of a single example of it myself.
When you put it that way, I understand better why the spelling continues to be used, but that doesn't stop me from finding it counterintuitive and baffling. You'll have to excuse me here; you've been learning Irish since I was a wee bairn. I just started figuring out how to read it recently.linguoboy wrote:This touches on one of the primary issues with Irish orthography: It's pandialectal. You can look at that as a bug (in that you have to apply some phonological adjustments to get from the underlying forms suggested by the standard spelling to surface forms in any particular variety) or you can look at it as a feature (because by applying some phonological adjustments you can get from the underlying forms suggested by the standard spelling to surface forms in a particular variety).
Who said I was trying to learn anything? I'm just curious about how it works. (If I were to learn any Celtic language, it'd be Scottish Gaelic or Welsh anyway.)Speaking of dialects, btw, I can't figure out which one it is you're trying to learn.
Chekhov wrote:Who said I was trying to learn anything? I'm just curious about how it works. (If I were to learn any Celtic language, it'd be Scottish Gaelic or Welsh anyway.)Speaking of dialects, btw, I can't figure out which one it is you're trying to learn.
But isn't Scottish more regular?linguoboy wrote:In that case, you're a glutton for punishment. Irish has been through a recent spelling reform, the primary goal of which was to eliminate silent letters. Scottish-Gaelic still uses the traditional orthography--and has more vowel phonemes.
From Wikipedia mostly, but the plethora of dialects is the problem to me. I have no idea which one I'd pick. (I'm not even sure where my ancestors came from, so that doesn't help.)I'm still curious what source(s) you're drawing your examples from that are mixing pronunciations from different dialects so indiscriminately. No wonder it's baffling! Even Spanish would be if you mixed up pronunciations from all over the peninsula.
IME, French isn't terribly irregular. At least, it's better than Japanese.I think the distinction between deep and shallow orthographies is useful here. The orthography of Irish is pretty deep, but still overwhelmingly regular--comparable to French, in my opinion.
Chekhov wrote:But isn't Scottish more regular?linguoboy wrote:In that case, you're a glutton for punishment. Irish has been through a recent spelling reform, the primary goal of which was to eliminate silent letters. Scottish-Gaelic still uses the traditional orthography--and has more vowel phonemes.
Chekhov wrote:IME, French isn't terribly irregular. At least, it's better than Japanese.I think the distinction between deep and shallow orthographies is useful here. The orthography of Irish is pretty deep, but still overwhelmingly regular--comparable to French, in my opinion.
Chekhov wrote:From Wikipedia mostly, but the plethora of dialects is the problem to me. I have no idea which one I'd pick. (I'm not even sure where my ancestors came from, so that doesn't help.)
Why'd you pick Munster? Do you have relatives there?linguoboy wrote:That actually makes it easier, because then you can just go with what your materials teach. In general, the Connacht dialects are considered closest to the official standard (and have the most active speaker communities) and the Ulster dialects most distant. Most L2 speakers, however, speak something of a mishmash they learned in school.
As mentioned before, I chose a Munster dialect, West Muskerry, for active mastery, but most speakers I interact with speak Connacht or Ulster. Learning to understand them isn't any more difficult than learning to understand speakers of different dialects of any other language.
Chekhov wrote:Why'd you pick Munster? Do you have relatives there?
księżycowy wrote:Interestingly enough my Irish ancestry comes from County Cork as well. And I would like to get a smidgen of Munster Irish too, but I figure any Irish will do in the end.
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