Moderator:kevin
meidei wrote:deiniol, welsh version of daniel. sampa pls, mobile can't display most IPA symbols.
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!
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.
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?)
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).
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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).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).
Aside from some basilectal kinds of English, what else has that?/ð/ > /ɣ/ strikes me as no more unusual than /ð/ > /v/, which is attested for several languages, including English.
Which languages have that? I can name bucketloads that have /w/> /v/, but not the other way around./v/ > /w/ strikes me as so common to be unworthy of mention.
Chekhov wrote:To me at least, the <a> of Gael and <e> of beo are not pronounced; they change the quality of the consonant.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).
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).
Chekhov wrote:Aside from some basilectal kinds of English, what else has that?/ð/ > /ɣ/ strikes me as no more unusual than /ð/ > /v/, which is attested for several languages, including English.
Chekhov wrote:Which languages have that? I can name bucketloads that have /w/> /v/, but not the other way around./v/ > /w/ strikes me as so common to be unworthy of mention.
Not that hard. Russian has both /CʲV/ and /CʲjV/ ; can you do that?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.
Except it looks like */'foːwər/! Madness, I tell you!I have /'foːr/ for fómhar, actually. But /'fuːr/ doesn't seem that odd as alternative.
See, I wouldn't expect /au/ here, because the usual way of spelling that is abh/amh. That's what I mean by confusing.Scanradh is pronounced just as I would expect. Cf. anró > /au'roː/, banríon /bau'riːn/, ceanrach > /'caurəx/, etc.
It did? Perhaps you can give me some examples from Swedish, the only one I've ever learned worth a damn.Finnish and the North Germanic languages for starters.
Yeah, but it's also Faroese.(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.)
Did that happen in Romance languages?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].
Chekhov wrote:Not that hard. Russian has both /CʲV/ and /CʲjV/ ; can you do that?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.
Chekhov wrote:Except it looks like */'foːwər/! Madness, I tell you!I have /'foːr/ for fómhar, actually. But /'fuːr/ doesn't seem that odd as alternative.
Chekhov wrote:See, I wouldn't expect /au/ here, because the usual way of spelling that is abh/amh. That's what I mean by confusing.Scanradh is pronounced just as I would expect. Cf. anró > /au'roː/, banríon /bau'riːn/, ceanrach > /'caurəx/, etc.
Chekhov wrote:It did? Perhaps you can give me some examples from Swedish, the only one I've ever learned worth a damn.Finnish and the North Germanic languages for starters.
Chekhov wrote:Did that happen in Romance languages?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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