pronunciation of a name

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pronunciation of a name

Postby md0 » 2011-11-05, 10:52

deiniol, welsh version of daniel. sampa pls, mobile can't display most IPA symbols.
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby linguoboy » 2011-11-05, 17:06

meidei wrote:deiniol, welsh version of daniel. sampa pls, mobile can't display most IPA symbols.

Just the way it's spelled, i.e. /'dEinjOl/.
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby md0 » 2011-11-06, 6:43

thanks. didn't expect welsh to be so straightforward.
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby linguoboy » 2011-11-07, 18:28

meidei wrote:thanks. didn't expect welsh to be so straightforward.

IME, the modern Celtic languages (Manx excepted) are pretty straightforward when it comes to pronunciation. Don't let their proximity to English fool you!
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby Chekhov » 2011-11-07, 23:48

What makes them any more straightforward than, say, English?
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby Prosper_Youplaboum » 2011-11-08, 0:34

IME, the modern Celtic languages (Manx excepted) are pretty straightforward when it comes to pronunciation. Don't let their proximity to English fool you!


Manx excepted, Scottish Gaelic excepted, Breton excepted, and Irish excepted :rotfl:
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby linguoboy » 2011-11-08, 1:41

Prosper_Youplaboum wrote:
IME, the modern Celtic languages (Manx excepted) are pretty straightforward when it comes to pronunciation. Don't let their proximity to English fool you!

Manx excepted, Scottish Gaelic excepted, Breton excepted, and Irish excepted.

How many of these languages have you studied? A' bhfuil aon Ghaelainn agùt, a chara, Gaelainn na hÉireann nú Gaelainn na hAlban?
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby Chekhov » 2011-11-08, 1:48

I've never studied Serbian but I find it much more straightforward to pronounce than Scottish Gaelic, because a) there is a clearer 1:1 relationship between letters and phonemes and b) the sounds that the letters represent are much more intuitive to me. (Seriously, <dh> for /ɣ/? What the hell were they smoking when they came up with that?)
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby DelBoy » 2011-11-08, 12:37

Chekhov wrote:I've never studied Serbian but I find it much more straightforward to pronounce than Scottish Gaelic, because a) there is a clearer 1:1 relationship between letters and phonemes and b) the sounds that the letters represent are much more intuitive to me. (Seriously, <dh> for /ɣ/? What the hell were they smoking when they came up with that?)


As far as I know the séimhiú/lenition (at least in Irish) is written as a 'h' (in modern spelling) because (correct me if I'm wrong linguoboy/anyone else who actually knows about this stuff) the old diacritic, the 'ponc' (a dot above the lenited consonant), was replaced (by 'h', which is not really a fully fledged letter in Irish/Gaelic) to make typing/printing easier (similar to how 'e' is sometimes used in German to indicate an umlaut on the previous vowel).
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby linguoboy » 2011-11-08, 17:05

DelBoy wrote:As far as I know the séimhiú/lenition (at least in Irish) is written as a 'h' (in modern spelling) because (correct me if I'm wrong linguoboy/anyone else who actually knows about this stuff) the old diacritic, the 'ponc' (a dot above the lenited consonant), was replaced (by 'h', which is not really a fully fledged letter in Irish/Gaelic) to make typing/printing easier (similar to how 'e' is sometimes used in German to indicate an umlaut on the previous vowel).

That's all true enough as far as it goes, but I think that Chekhov's complaint (to the degree he has a legitimate one and isn't simply trolling us as he has before on the subject of Irish orthography) isn't with the "h" so much as the "d". It's quite reasonable from a diachronic point of view: Old Irish /ð/ and /ɣ/ fell together during the Middle Irish period, but the spelling wasn't changed to reflect this. It only seems bizarre when you take a deliberately ahistorical view, comparable to asking what Middle English authors were smoking when they decided to to write /ai/ as "igh".
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby DelBoy » 2011-11-08, 17:24

Ah, right, of course, my bad...
(it never occurred to me that the 'd' was the problem... :lol: )
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby Chekhov » 2011-11-09, 0:01

As I've stated before, the most confusing part about Irish spelling is that I can't tell which vowels are actually pronounced and which are just inserted to conform to the "slender to slender and broad to broad" rule. If there is a regular way, I haven't been able to figure it out.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Irish written in uncial script still uses the dot above instead of h, doesn't it?
That's all true enough as far as it goes, but I think that Chekhov's complaint (to the degree he has a legitimate one and isn't simply trolling us as he has before on the subject of Irish orthography) isn't with the "h" so much as the "d". It's quite reasonable from a diachronic point of view: Old Irish /ð/ and /ɣ/ fell together during the Middle Irish period, but the spelling wasn't changed to reflect this.
Reasonable? /ð/ > /ɣ/ and /θ/ > /h/ (not to mention /ṽ/ > /w/!) all strike me as extremely unusual changes. That's what makes it so counterintuitive to me.
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby YngNghymru » 2011-11-09, 1:21

/ð/ > /ɣ/ is strange, but there's nothing odd about the other two.
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby DelBoy » 2011-11-09, 1:47

Chekhov wrote:As I've stated before, the most confusing part about Irish spelling is that I can't tell which vowels are actually pronounced and which are just inserted to conform to the "slender to slender and broad to broad" rule. If there is a regular way, I haven't been able to figure it out.


I thought we cleared that up before? All vowels are pronounced, and all vowels (next to a consonant) also affect the consonant (in a slender/broad way).
No vowel is inserted just to conform to a spelling rule.
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby linguoboy » 2011-11-09, 2:30

Chekhov wrote:As I've stated before, the most confusing part about Irish spelling is that I can't tell which vowels are actually pronounced and which are just inserted to conform to the "slender to slender and broad to broad" rule. If there is a regular way, I haven't been able to figure it out.

For starters, a síneadh fada always indicates the vowel is pronounced. The only time it's left off is with eo because there are only three cases where the o in this digraph is short (seo, deoch, and eochair) so most of the time it's redundant.

Then you have the four digraphs ae, ao, ia, and ua. The first represents /eː/ flanked by broad consonants. Ao used to represent /ɯː/ (and still does in Scottish Gaelic) but has since fallen together with /iː/ (Ulster, Connacht) or /eː/ (Munster). Ia and ua both represent a long vowel followed by a shwa, i.e. /iːə/, /uːə/.

Except for í, all of these vowel spellings take i to show a following slender consonant, i.e. ái, éi, úi, ói, aei, aoi, iai, uai. Aoi is /iː/ in all dialects (including Munster) and iai is rare because /iːə/ historically derives from /eː/ before broad consonants. (E.g Niall "Neill", genitive Néill.) The i is pleonastic after é, but so what? To show that the consonant before is slender, á and ó add e (and ó loses the síneadh fada, as already mentioned) while ú adds i. (There is no *eu digraph in Irish, with or without síntí fada.) Ia and í only occur after slender consonants and the remaining digraphs only follow broad ones.

In general, the same rules apply to the short vowels: (e)a(i) for /a/, e(i) for /e/, and (i)u for /u/. But for some digraphs, the nature of the following consonant becomes relevant as well: ui only represents /u/ before rC, otherwise it's /i/; io is /i/ before coronals and th and /u/ elsewhere.

The only really unpredictable case is oi, which can be /o/, /e/, or /i/ without much rhyme or reason, e.g. cois "foot [dat.]" is /koʃ/ but crois "cross [dat.]" is /kriʃ/. For Munster, I've found the easiest strategy is to memorise the dozen or so cases where it represents /o/ and the three or four where it's /e/ and otherwise assume it's /i/. A different strategy might makes more sense for a different dialect.

Chekhov wrote:Reasonable? /ð/ > /ɣ/ and /θ/ > /h/ (not to mention /ṽ/ > /w/!) all strike me as extremely unusual changes. That's what makes it so counterintuitive to me.

/ð/ > /ɣ/ strikes me as no more unusual than /ð/ > /v/, which is attested for several languages, including English. /θ/ > /h/ is found in Finnish, Spanish, Indo-Aryan, Athabascan, and elsewhere. And /v/ > /w/ strikes me as so common to be unworthy of mention. The difficulty probably comes from thinking of it as one change, /ṽ/ > /w/, instead of /ṽ/ > /Ṽv/ > /Ṽw/ > /w/. Moreover, Munster preserves a labiovelar articulation of this phoneme except when broad and in pretonic position, e.g. bhfuil ['wɪlʲ] but bhios [vʲiːs̪ˠ], ubh ['ɔvˠ].)
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby Chekhov » 2011-11-09, 4:22

I thought we cleared that up before? All vowels are pronounced, and all vowels (next to a consonant) also affect the consonant (in a slender/broad way).
To me at least, the <a> of Gael and <e> of beo are not pronounced; they change the quality of the consonant. Then we have words that are simply not pronounced as would be expected, like fómhar (sounds like fúmhar) and scanradh (sounds like scamhradh).
/ð/ > /ɣ/ strikes me as no more unusual than /ð/ > /v/, which is attested for several languages, including English.
Aside from some basilectal kinds of English, what else has that?
/v/ > /w/ strikes me as so common to be unworthy of mention.
Which languages have that? I can name bucketloads that have /w/> /v/, but not the other way around.
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby linguoboy » 2011-11-09, 5:05

Chekhov wrote:
I thought we cleared that up before? All vowels are pronounced, and all vowels (next to a consonant) also affect the consonant (in a slender/broad way).
To me at least, the <a> of Gael and <e> of beo are not pronounced; they change the quality of the consonant.

I don't know about you, but I can't pronounce either of these words without a brief onglide, palatal in the case of beo, velar in the case of Gael. The latter sounds nothing at all like the pronunciation of Gael in English.

Chekhov wrote:Then we have words that are simply not pronounced as would be expected, like fómhar (sounds like fúmhar) and scanradh (sounds like scamhradh).

I have /'foːr/ for fómhar, actually. But /'fuːr/ doesn't seem that odd as alternative.

Scanradh is pronounced just as I would expect. Cf. anró > /au'roː/, banríon /bau'riːn/, ceanrach > /'caurəx/, etc.

Chekhov wrote:
/ð/ > /ɣ/ strikes me as no more unusual than /ð/ > /v/, which is attested for several languages, including English.
Aside from some basilectal kinds of English, what else has that?

Finnish and the North Germanic languages for starters. (Which reminds me: Faeroese also has /ð/ > /g/ in a few cases. That's got to be even weirder than /ð/ > /ɣ/, don't you think.)

Chekhov wrote:
/v/ > /w/ strikes me as so common to be unworthy of mention.
Which languages have that? I can name bucketloads that have /w/> /v/, but not the other way around.

Well, for one thing, keep in mind that the historical value of /v/ was [β]. So the change is not really [v] > [w], it's [β] to [v], [ʋ], [u], or [w].
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby Chekhov » 2011-11-09, 5:17

linguoboy wrote:I don't know about you, but I can't pronounce either of these words without a brief onglide, palatal in the case of beo, velar in the case of Gael. The latter sounds nothing at all like the pronunciation of Gael in English.
Not that hard. Russian has both /CʲV/ and /CʲjV/ ; can you do that?
I have /'foːr/ for fómhar, actually. But /'fuːr/ doesn't seem that odd as alternative.
Except it looks like */'foːwər/! Madness, I tell you!
Scanradh is pronounced just as I would expect. Cf. anró > /au'roː/, banríon /bau'riːn/, ceanrach > /'caurəx/, etc.
See, I wouldn't expect /au/ here, because the usual way of spelling that is abh/amh. That's what I mean by confusing.
Finnish and the North Germanic languages for starters.
It did? Perhaps you can give me some examples from Swedish, the only one I've ever learned worth a damn.
(Which reminds me: Faeroese also has /ð/ > /g/ in a few cases. That's got to be even weirder than /ð/ > /ɣ/, don't you think.)
Yeah, but it's also Faroese.
Well, for one thing, keep in mind that the historical value of /v/ was [β]. So the change is not really [v] > [w], it's [β] to [v], [ʋ], [u], or [w].
Did that happen in Romance languages?
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby linguoboy » 2011-11-09, 5:34

Chekhov wrote:
linguoboy wrote:I don't know about you, but I can't pronounce either of these words without a brief onglide, palatal in the case of beo, velar in the case of Gael. The latter sounds nothing at all like the pronunciation of Gael in English.
Not that hard. Russian has both /CʲV/ and /CʲjV/ ; can you do that?

Nope. I've tried to learn the distinction before, but it escapes me.

Chekhov wrote:
I have /'foːr/ for fómhar, actually. But /'fuːr/ doesn't seem that odd as alternative.
Except it looks like */'foːwər/! Madness, I tell you!

No it doesn't, it looks like /'foːr/. Medial /v/ just isn't very stable in Irish. It's the same in Welsh, where /v/ (and /ð/) often drop out, occasionally with compensatory lengthening (e.g. /'du:r/ for dwfr).

Come to think of it, it's not that different from English, where the realisation of medial glides is rather variable. Some people delete them where others don't (e.g. "Da Mare") and some insert them where others wouldn't (e.g. "the Lowered Ower Gawd").

Chekhov wrote:
Scanradh is pronounced just as I would expect. Cf. anró > /au'roː/, banríon /bau'riːn/, ceanrach > /'caurəx/, etc.
See, I wouldn't expect /au/ here, because the usual way of spelling that is abh/amh. That's what I mean by confusing.

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.

Chekhov wrote:
Finnish and the North Germanic languages for starters.
It did? Perhaps you can give me some examples from Swedish, the only one I've ever learned worth a damn.

I know I learned some Swedish examples, but I can't remember them now. I'll look them up tomorrow.

Chekhov wrote:
Well, for one thing, keep in mind that the historical value of /v/ was [β]. So the change is not really [v] > [w], it's [β] to [v], [ʋ], [u], or [w].
Did that happen in Romance languages?

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.
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Re: pronunciation of a name

Postby DelBoy » 2011-11-09, 11:03

Fómhar - /'foːr/ or /'foːwər/..... not too far apart really, are they? (And I've heard it pronounced as the latter by some people).

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.

(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.)
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