Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

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eien
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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby eien » 2013-05-19, 23:24

Béolu is acc. pl. of bél.
Stifter's Sengoidelc 6.8.1.2:
o-stem words of one syllable that have é as their vowel in the nom. sing. (!) are more complicated. [...] If a syllable containing u follows or in case of u-inflection (pre. sg. and acc. pl.), é changes to the diphthong /ēu̯/, spelled éu, éo


Aineóil is gen. sg. aineól which is just eól plus the privative prefix. This is apparently from PIE *i-tlo-m.

I'm not familiar with the historical phonetics behind each case, but it seems kind of intuitive.

edit: I probably misread your post, nevermind. You might want to look at David Greene's "The Diphthongs of Old Irish.". The journal it's in is participating in JSTOR's Register and Read program.

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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby sa wulfs » 2013-05-19, 23:45

Ah, that thing about /e:u/ is exactly the kind of stuff my source has virtually no info on. I should get me a copy of Stifter's book. Makes perfect sense then. I didn't know Old Irish had that diphthong, so I was forced to analyze the <e> as a diacritic.

Thanks!
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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby Ciarán12 » 2013-05-20, 0:45

Okay, I gave pronouncing the revised transcriptions a shot (sorry if the volume isn't great):

a chacc bréoin - https://soundcloud.com/user563022934/a-chacc-br-oin

a chride in éoin ittig - https://soundcloud.com/user563022934/a- ... -oin-ittig

a maic mallachtan - https://soundcloud.com/user563022934/a-maic-mallachtan

bás fort béolu - https://soundcloud.com/user563022934/b-s-fort-b-olu

úir ainéoil tarut - https://soundcloud.com/user563022934/ir-ain-oil-tarut

tréithḟer - https://soundcloud.com/user563022934/tr-ithfer

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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby sa wulfs » 2013-05-20, 10:28

Those are great, thank you! And wow, there's NO WAY I'd be able to pronounce those slender consonants without practicing nonstop for, like, a month. Especially v´and r´.
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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby Ciarán12 » 2013-05-20, 16:03

sa wulfs wrote:Those are great, thank you! And wow, there's NO WAY I'd be able to pronounce those slender consonants without practicing nonstop for, like, a month. Especially v´and r´.


:D Thanks! I've had practice with them in Modern Irish (I'm still going under the impression here that Old Irish slender /r/ is the same as in Modern Irish). On the whole, now that I listen back to the recordings, it sounds a lot more like Scots Gaelic than Irish to me. Interesting.

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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby linguoboy » 2013-05-20, 16:10

sa wulfs wrote:A chride ind éin ittig (“Oh, heart of a fluttering bird”)

Isn't this "O heart of the fluttering bird!"?
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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby mōdgethanc » 2013-05-20, 20:31

There are a few consonants that I'm not really sure how to pronounce. For example, in Modern Irish (the way I speak it anyway) a "broad" /r/ is a tap and a "slender" /r/ is a voiced alveolar fricative, but I don't know if that was the case in OI.
Uhh ... a [z]?

AFAIK both Irish rhotics are taps. Easy enough to pronounce if you can do it in Spanish.
Also, I have no idea what a slender trilled (fortis) /r/ would sound like.
[rʲ] like the Russian word время. I find it much harder than the tap, though.
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]

Ciarán12

Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby Ciarán12 » 2013-05-20, 21:16

mōdgethanc wrote:
There are a few consonants that I'm not really sure how to pronounce. For example, in Modern Irish (the way I speak it anyway) a "broad" /r/ is a tap and a "slender" /r/ is a voiced alveolar fricative, but I don't know if that was the case in OI.
Uhh ... a [z]?


Retroflex - [ʐ].

mōdgethanc wrote:AFAIK both Irish rhotics are taps. Easy enough to pronounce if you can do it in Spanish.


I'm pretty sure it differs from dialect to dialect, but my pronunciation is more or less based on Munster Irish. There, it's not a tap.
Listen to the first sentence this guy says in the video (14 seconds in). All the r's in that sentence (the way he pronounces it) are slender. It'd transcribe that sound as [ʐ]. What he says is written as:
Tá deartháir amháin agus beirt deirfiúr agam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MxX5WbGlgU&list=PL0A123C9E96753B95

mōdgethanc wrote:
Also, I have no idea what a slender trilled (fortis) /r/ would sound like.
[rʲ] like the Russian word время. I find it much harder than the tap, though.


I'll look into that...

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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby sa wulfs » 2013-05-20, 21:23

linguoboy wrote:
sa wulfs wrote:A chride ind éin ittig (“Oh, heart of a fluttering bird”)

Isn't this "O heart of the fluttering bird!"?

Well, sure, if you want to be more literal.
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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby linguoboy » 2013-05-20, 21:55

sa wulfs wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
sa wulfs wrote:A chride ind éin ittig (“Oh, heart of a fluttering bird”)

Isn't this "O heart of the fluttering bird!"?

Well, sure, if you want to be more literal.

And the reason you wouldn't want that in this context is...?
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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby mōdgethanc » 2013-05-21, 0:03

Ciarán12 wrote:Retroflex - [ʐ].
I thought that seemed strange at first, but then I remembered that Mandarin, Vietnamese and Swedish all have [ʐ] as an allophone of /r/. Scottish Gaelic has [ð] for slender /r/ in some dialects - try to top that.
Listen to the first sentence this guy says in the video (14 seconds in). All the r's in that sentence (the way he pronounces it) are slender. It'd transcribe that sound as [ʐ]. What he says is written as:
Tá deartháir amháin agus beirt deirfiúr agam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MxX5WbGlgU&list=PL0A123C9E96753B95
I guess so, but even his "broad" /r/ sounds like a fricative in some places. Maybe it's an unvoiced trill, like Icelandic?

Other features of his accent sound non-standard to me, like his /ɑː/ sounding more like an [ɔː] and word-final /j/ being [ɟ]. I don't know much about Irish phonology, so I'm guessing this is typical of his dialect. I wonder if he's a native speaker.
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]

Ciarán12

Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby Ciarán12 » 2013-05-21, 0:29

mōdgethanc wrote:
Ciarán12 wrote:Retroflex - [ʐ].
I thought that seemed strange at first, but then I remembered that Mandarin, Vietnamese and Swedish all have [ʐ] as an allophone of /r/. Scottish Gaelic has [ð] for slender /r/ in some dialects - try to top that.


Seems believable, if a bit bizarre.

mōdgethanc wrote:
Listen to the first sentence this guy says in the video (14 seconds in). All the r's in that sentence (the way he pronounces it) are slender. It'd transcribe that sound as [ʐ]. What he says is written as:
Tá deartháir amháin agus beirt deirfiúr agam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MxX5WbGlgU&list=PL0A123C9E96753B95
I guess so, but even his "broad" /r/ sounds like a fricative in some places. Maybe it's an unvoiced trill, like Icelandic?


linguoboy is better informed than I am about this, but there are a few instances where Munster Irish has a broad consonant where the standard has a slender and vice versa. I think he already mentioned this regarding the pronunciation of deirfiúr in this thread.

mōdgethanc wrote:Other features of his accent sound non-standard to me, like his /ɑː/ sounding more like an [ɔː] and word-final /j/ being [ɟ]. I don't know much about Irish phonology, so I'm guessing this is typical of his dialect. I wonder if he's a native speaker.


Irish doesn't really have a "standard" accent, only a standard grammar and orthography. <á> as either [ɑː] or [ɔː] both look okay to me. Word-final /j/ as [ɟ] is a Munster feature, yes. He sounds pretty native to me.

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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby mōdgethanc » 2013-05-21, 0:40

Irish doesn't really have a "standard" accent, only a standard grammar and orthography. <á> as either [ɑː] or [ɔː] both look okay to me. Word-final /j/ as [ɟ] is a Munster feature, yes. He sounds pretty native to me.
Doesn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Irish seems to be an attempt at a pan-dialectal accent for transcribing words, and this is the accent I see prescribed in the books on Irish I've looked at (admittedly not many). Of course native speakers are going to speak with whatever accent they grew up with, and non-natives might pick one to imitate, but this looks about as standard as it gets to me.
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]

Ciarán12

Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby Ciarán12 » 2013-05-21, 0:56

mōdgethanc wrote:
Irish doesn't really have a "standard" accent, only a standard grammar and orthography. <á> as either [ɑː] or [ɔː] both look okay to me. Word-final /j/ as [ɟ] is a Munster feature, yes. He sounds pretty native to me.
Doesn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Irish seems to be an attempt at a pan-dialectal accent for transcribing words, and this is the accent I see prescribed in the books on Irish I've looked at (admittedly not many). Of course native speakers are going to speak with whatever accent they grew up with, and non-natives might pick one to imitate, but this looks about as standard as it gets to me.


I don't want to derail this thread, so I'll answer your post here.
Last edited by Ciarán12 on 2013-05-25, 3:06, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby sa wulfs » 2013-05-25, 1:40

Prof. Gregory Toner, who happens to be, oh, I don't know, just the director of the frickin' eDIL ( :mrgreen: ), was so kind as to make a recording of his own. You can check the attachment below.

Gotta admit, a few things were not as I expected. With any luck I'll get more recordings and we'll be able to compare.
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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby Ciarán12 » 2013-05-25, 1:51

sa wulfs wrote:Prof. Gregory Toner, who happens to be, oh, I don't know, just the director of the frickin' eDIL ( :mrgreen: ), was so kind as to make a recording of his own. You can check the attachment below.

Gotta admit, a few things were not as I expected. With any luck I'll get more recordings and we'll be able to compare.


That is awesome! :D It's so cool to be able to compare my own rendition with that of someone as well-versed in Old Irish as that.

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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby sa wulfs » 2013-09-09, 0:39

So, I'm trying to come up with a few more phrases for the same project. Could you please check these transcriptions? Bear in mind the time period would be near the end of the Old Irish period and the beginning of the Middle Irish period, so some changes apply (like the reduction of all final vowels to [ə] and presumably some heavy shit I can barely comprehend and which changed Irish diphthongs forever).

Also, if I could get recordings for these ones too, that would be super awesome :). But I know that this ain't easy, so I'll be more than happy if I just get someone to double-check my transcriptions.

First, two old ones I modified slightly:

Bás fort béolu (“Death upon your lips”)
[baːs fort ˈvʲeːo̯lə]
(I had [ˈvʲeːo̯lu] before, which I believe would be outdated for this period)

A thréithḟir (“Cowards, weaklings”)
[a ˈθʲrʲeːθʲˌiɾʲ]
(Used to be "Tréithḟer")

And now, the new ones:

Na fes cía cú rot·chac for otrach (“No one knows what dog shit you out onto a dunghill”)
[na fʲes kʲiːa̯ kuː ˈrotˌxak for ˈotrəx]

Narab marthain duit (“May you not remain alive”)
[ˈnaɾəb ˈmarθənʲ dutʲ]

Mallacht Críst airib (“Christ’s curse on you”)
[ˈmaʟəxt kʲrʲiːst ˈaɾʲəbʲ]

In comram beós (“On with the contest”)
[inʲ ˈkoṽɾəm bʲoːs]

Thanks in advance!
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Re: Old Irish/ Sengoídelc

Postby Mar » 2022-03-03, 21:46

Hi I am interested in Learning Old Irish and would love to get info on it or a class or practice materials, or whatever you were suggesting.


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