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IpseDixit wrote:And what about books, TV and other means of communication? Are they in the standards or the dialects or both?
IpseDixit wrote:Since księżyc doesn't mind his thread being derailed, I'm gonna ask here a question I've been having in my mind for quite some time now: do you think that the course of Irish after Irish Independence would've been different if the language of the colonizers had not been English but some other minor national language of Europe lacking the scope of English, like say Norwegian? Is it fair to assume that, in that case, there would've been more serious efforts to get rid of it and make Irish the true and only national language of all Irish people? I know we're in the realm of "linguistic fiction" here, but if someone has some hypotheses in this respect, I'd be glad if they shared them here.
kevin wrote:księżycowy wrote:Essentially what happened is that in the North, they gave up their local dialects in favour of a more prestigious Southern written language, but didn't really know how things were pronounced in the South, so they used some kind of spelling pronunciation, except with a different interpretation of the spelling. And then this pronunciation ended up becoming the standard, so it matches neither the original Northern dialects nor the Southern ones.
księżycowy wrote:It seems it is based on one prestigious dialect historically, no? At least that's what I got from your reply.
linguoboy wrote:/gno:higˊ/ (Der Strich ist nicht unwichitig!) I would also indicate stress placement here, since even though it's predictable, speakers of other varieties won't know the rules.
linguoboy wrote:IpseDixit wrote:And what about books, TV and other means of communication? Are they in the standards or the dialects or both?
Mostly CO. Native speakers will use their own dialects when speaking on radio or television and in their own literary production. But these days most publications are authored by non-natives.
księżycowy wrote:By the time that some languages are "standardised", do they usually follow pronunciation? I'm thinking French and English here.
księżycowy wrote:I was basically saying that by the time a language is standardised, it doesn't nessicarily follow the pronunciation. Even if it does, it doesn't mean it stay that way.
dEhiN wrote:Linguoboy can correct me if I'm wrong, but for example, news reports would need to be understandable by L1 speakers of all dialects. And is it not this normative pronunciation that is generally taught to L2 speakers, at least in resources like TY and such where you are learning on your own?
dEhiN wrote:due to the proliferation of audio media due to technology, most major and even some minor languages have essentially a standardised or normative pronunciation that accompanies the written standard.
linguoboy wrote:There was an attempt to develop an artificial norm in the form of the Lárchanúint ("central dialect"), but even learners I know don't use it.
kevin wrote:linguoboy wrote:There was an attempt to develop an artificial norm in the form of the Lárchanúint ("central dialect"), but even learners I know don't use it.
Actually, I once tried to find out what sounds the Lárchanúint even uses and could barely find anything about it on the internet except that it allegedly exists (and that it's inferior to dialects of course - no discussion about anything related to Irish without this). Is it really that obscure or did I just do something wrong with my search?
linguoboy wrote:Perhaps I'm misremembering, but I could've sworn that this Wikipedia page used to state that the pronunciations given were taken from the Lárchanúint. Certainly, they look rather "neutral" (i.e. close to but not identical to Connacht, with no notable dialect-specific features).
The authoritative source is Lárchanúint don Ghaeilge (Institiúid Teangeolaíochta Éireann, 1986). Although other normative works (notably the Graiméar na mBráithre Críostaí and the de Bhaldraithe and Ó Dónaill dictionaries) have been made available for free online, that doesn't seem to be the case with this one. I think most people's source for the Lárchanúint is actually the Foclóir Poca, the only commonly-used Irish dictionary to include pronunciation information.
kevin wrote:Ok, thanks. Then I guess no Lárchanúint for me. I mean I wasn't planning to actually use it (well, me actually speaking Irish is unlikely enough...), it was pure curiosity anyway.
linguoboy wrote:What's interesting to me is how pronunciation often ends up following the standard. As kevin says, the German norm is the result of L2 speakers from the North treating a purely written variety as a living language and concocting their own pronunciation for it. This is an extreme example, but something like this happens with all normative varieties. Just yesterday, we were discussing the pronunciation of solder on a friend's wall and I discovered that there are varieties in English in which the l is pronounced--despite the fact that it was only reinserted during the Latinising craze of the Enlightenment.
Modern Irish is actually less subject to this than most European vernaculars since illiteracy was so widespread until recently. I suspect, though, that a lot of dialectal variant pronunciations listed in Ó Cuív's work (the basis for the pronunciations given in TY Irish) are under threat if not already replaced by closer approximations to the CO forms. I'd be interested to find out, for instance, whether people in Muskerry today still say /pəilˊəkaːn/ like their predecessors or if they've adopted a Munsterised version of féileacán instead.
linguoboy wrote:Just yesterday, we were discussing the pronunciation of solder on a friend's wall and I discovered that there are varieties in English in which the l is pronounced--despite the fact that it was only reinserted during the Latinising craze of the Enlightenment.
Ciarán (if you remember him)
vijayjohn wrote:linguoboy wrote:Just yesterday, we were discussing the pronunciation of solder on a friend's wall and I discovered that there are varieties in English in which the l is pronounced--despite the fact that it was only reinserted during the Latinising craze of the Enlightenment.
I didn't even know the l was supposed to be dropped until now.
vijayjohn wrote:linguoboy wrote:Just yesterday, we were discussing the pronunciation of solder on a friend's wall and I discovered that there are varieties in English in which the l is pronounced--despite the fact that it was only reinserted during the Latinising craze of the Enlightenment.
I didn't even know the l was supposed to be dropped until now.
eskandar wrote:vijayjohn wrote:linguoboy wrote:Just yesterday, we were discussing the pronunciation of solder on a friend's wall and I discovered that there are varieties in English in which the l is pronounced--despite the fact that it was only reinserted during the Latinising craze of the Enlightenment.
I didn't even know the l was supposed to be dropped until now.
I've never heard 'solder' pronounced with an L! Vijay, don't tell me you pronounce the L in 'salmon', too - I've heard this before from desis
linguoboy wrote:vijayjohn wrote:linguoboy wrote:Just yesterday, we were discussing the pronunciation of solder on a friend's wall and I discovered that there are varieties in English in which the l is pronounced--despite the fact that it was only reinserted during the Latinising craze of the Enlightenment.
I didn't even know the l was supposed to be dropped until now.
Solder was one of those words that it took me a long time to connect to the spoken form. Like I knew that solder was something used in metalworking and I knew that my father had a "soddering arn", but I didn't realise what the relationship was.
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