I wonder can it really be pronounced in that way /a:kwэN'/? There's a strong tendency for the Irish schwa to take the timbre of the neighbouring sounds, both vowels and consonants. These are examples from Lewis&Pedersen's Consise Comparative Grammar: salchar /salaxar/&/
sal@x@r/, urchar /oroxor/&/
or@x@r/, tarbh /taruw/, tarcuisne /tarkis'n'@/. As you can see, providing phonetic transcription they depict different quality of the schwa phoneme with /u,o,a,i,@/. For acmhainn I'd thus expect /akwuN'/ phonetically, but it's /
akw@N'/ phonemically. What I wrote above was taken from an Foclóir Póca where they strangely distinguish only i- and @-quality of the schwa, silencing about u-like schwas and stuff. I could've used // for the phonemic, and [] for the phonetic transcriptions in the traditional way, though it's all has mixed up since establishing new trends in phonetics. Le meas
