[Scottish Gaelic] Language Course

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ceid donn
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Re: [Scottish Gaelic] Language Course

Postby ceid donn » 2015-12-05, 22:45

You know, there IS a whole website of recordings of Canadian Scottish Gaelic speakers-- Cainnt mo Mhathair -- so you could check out and compare anything you read in wiki articles to, you know, real speakers. Just sayin'. Hell, the wiki article even mentions this site in the links.

I haven't spoken with any Canadian speakers for a while seeing I'm no longer taking classes with AGA. But I know I was not taught you can say r's like that and have never been told that by any speaker from Canada. With words with a broad vowel + rd, yes, but not with any consonant cluster. However, I want to stress that in Canada, a native Gaelic speaker's pronunciation will be heavily influenced by where they live and the Gaelic speakers who traditionally lived there. In Cape Breton, where most of the speakers I've known are from, these are people speaking dialects passed down to them from immigrants mostly from the Western Isles, like Lewis, Harris and Barra. I cannot speak for Gaelic speakers in other parts of Canada, as I have had very little contact with any native speakers from Canadian who isn't a Cape Bretoner.

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Sectori
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Re: [Scottish Gaelic] Language Course

Postby Sectori » 2015-12-21, 18:54

ceid donn wrote:You know, there IS a whole website of recordings of Canadian Scottish Gaelic speakers-- Cainnt mo Mhathair -- so you could check out and compare anything you read in wiki articles to, you know, real speakers. Just sayin'. Hell, the wiki article even mentions this site in the links.

you're right, I should have checked actual recordings — there's also An Drochaid Eadarainn, where, lo and behold, in the story "Creag nam Bròg", you can hear speaker, Eòs Labhrann Dòmhnallach from Boisdale, does have an /r/ —> [s] shift: you can hear him say ma[s]t instead of mart at about 1:11.

listening to the two people from Boisdale area on Cainnt Mo Mhàthar (and to the rest of Eòs Labhrann Dòmhnallach's story), it's definitely not an unconditional /r/ —> [∫] shift (and also it's not [∫] that Eòs has, anyway). I can't hear them doing it at all, and I don't think it happens after a slender vowel — Angus Currie definitely says mun cuair[∫]t with the /r/ intact.
agus tha mo chluasan eòlach air a’ mhac-talla fhathast / às dèidh dhomh dùsgadh
(mona nicleòid wagner, “fo shneachd”)

le humble
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Re: [Scottish Gaelic] Language Course

Postby le humble » 2016-08-09, 17:49

Hello every body

I'm just begin to learn gaidhlig with the 1970's can seo program

I just have to get the sound of

dha (two) what i've heard sometimes like ya or in the same lesson a slight g ? :hmm:
briogais dhubh sometime ru (with a french r) and sometime gu ? :hmm:
latha (day) i've heard vaha and not laha ? briogais dhubh
blath (hot) i've heard bwa and not blah? briogais dhubh

can you help me?

tapadh leibh

ceid donn
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Re: [Scottish Gaelic] Language Course

Postby ceid donn » 2016-10-08, 18:54

le humble wrote:Hello every body

I'm just begin to learn gaidhlig with the 1970's can seo program

I just have to get the sound of

dha (two) what i've heard sometimes like ya or in the same lesson a slight g ? :hmm:
briogais dhubh sometime ru (with a french r) and sometime gu ? :hmm:
latha (day) i've heard vaha and not laha ? briogais dhubh
blath (hot) i've heard bwa and not blah? briogais dhubh

can you help me?

tapadh leibh


Sorry for a late reply (I hope you come back, and if not I hope you were able to figur this out with other resources). But the Celtic subforum here doesn't get a lot of traffic and I personally avoid it due to issues in the past. Along with Sectori, who occasionally drop in from time to time, I'm the only other regular Unilanger here relatively advanced with Scottish Gaelic and I'm always happy to help earnest learner if I can.

I am familiar with Can Seo. I don't recall there being any ambiguity with the pronunciation (in fact, many of the people involved with that show were trained theater actors and have excellent diction in both English and Scottish Gaelic!). However, for learners, much of Gaelic's phonology can be really confusing until they get used to it. In most cases, Gaelic phonology is very consistent.

dha -- the dha sound (or a voiced velar fricative, or /ɣ/ in IPA) is definitely one that takes getting used to. It's a very common sound in Gaelic, and unfortunately it's also tricky for many learners. There is a little variation among speakers--some say it more voiced and "harder" than others--and context too affects how someone might say this. It's a very guttural consonant sound, a kind of guttural "gah" sound made from the back of the mouth with the tongue pulled back away from the front teeth and held up toward the back of the mouth.

If you are comfortable with/χ/ or voiceless uvular fricative--this would be the sound that some French speakers use for r but is ch in Gaelic, like in the words loch or ach--you can do the dha sound by simply voicing it, that is, add the "gah" sound to it.

This sound may be easier for French speakers used to pronouncing their r's as /χ/, but for us English speakers this is hard because we have to train the muscles of our throats to make this sound. The sound does take a bit of muscle exertion to produce, hence why some speakers soften it to a near y-like sound. But it needs to be a guttural sound, nonetheless, or you risk not being understood.

briogais dhubh - I assume you're asking about dhubh. Yes, here you will use the dha sound again, but with the vowel u. If it sounds like a "French r" to you it's because it is suppose to be guttural, as I was saying above, but it needs to be voiced with that "gah" sound. Again, some speakers would make it more guttural and harder than other speakers.

latha and blath- the initial l sound here is a broad l, or what we commonly call the dark L. This is not a sound that occurs in French or English. This one is a little tricky to describe. The full IPA for the dark L (according to linguist Michael Bauer, author of Blas na Gàidhlig: The Pracitical Guide to Gaelic Pronunciation) is /l̪ˠ-ɫ̪/. :? Sooo, instead we usually write it as /L/, which is what Celticists have come up as a kind of IPA shorthand. Bauer lists 4 different methods for producing the dark L, and I will not attempt to type them all out. But this is my trick:

Make a regular English l sound by saying "la la la". Hold your tongue in the place it touches right behind your front teeth. Hold it there, but depress the middle of you tongue, like there's a small ball inside your mouth and your tongue has to fit around it. With your tongue in that strange position, make a L sound. It will sound deeper, fuller, "darker" than a regular English L. Now say it with the word loch, making the l sound very full and dark. See how very Scottish and Gaelic-y that sounds? Yep. That's the dark L!

With the broad vowels o and u, the dark L tends to sound darker than with the broad a, so again, you will hear some variation. But that "darker" sound is why it may sound like a v or w to you. But it's not a v or w--it's just the very full, deep "dark L" sound and over time your ear will get used to it.

I hope this helps. Let me know if I can be of any further assistance. :D

Effy
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Re: [Scottish Gaelic] Language Course

Postby Effy » 2017-05-01, 2:22

I'm so glad I found this! I've just recently started learning Scottish Gaelic, like . . . super recently. I'm just now past the 'how are you' unit in my book. However, I'm finding that the hardest part is reading the words. Does anyone have any tips that could help?


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