Looking at the irregular set I am struck by that they mostly vary in the future and conditional root, and in the regular one has to put up with synthetic endings on the imperfect and conditional, so all one is doing is getting a pair whose backside is changing rather than the ending, if you get my drift. One is used to the 'irregularity of the synthetic' in the regular verbs, so 'irregularity of the root' should not be too difficult.

Most irregulars are like this. The more irregular ones are even less in number

abair,beir,déan,faigh,feic,ith,tabhair,tar,téigh,bí,
are all irregular verbs so they don't follow the patterns of regular conjugation of verbs

I should have couched it in terms of 'degree of irrationality' not simply a dichotomy.

Also, as an aside, it varies; in the central Donegal dialect, they lenite the future stem in abair, so one gets 'dhearha me' for 'dearfaidh mé'.

Mick Rua,
is there other such divergences in Conemara like that?

Are you sure they say "dhéarha mé" in Central Donegal? What is your source?

Because in all the places in Donegal I know, people say "déarfaidh mé" or "deirfidh mé" or "abróchaidh mé". Never heard of "dhéarfaidh mé" so far, but maybe I'm wrong.

It makes me think of the lenited form of the verb to do in the future, in whole Donegal: dhéanfaidh mé, which historically was ghéanfaidh mé (that's why I spell it like that).

The bean an tigh was saying it in Coimín part of Glenfin. The important part was the lenition in the future -i might have got the stem vowel mixed in my memory (dean/déan), but it was definitely lenited. My notes have as well 'dheina me amárah' (excuse the spelling, its as is) for 'I will/shall do (it) tomorrow'.

I have no more examples as I stopped interrogating them at that point! I dont pretend to be 100% rock solid but I rechecked with them on the second one.

As for dheina/dheine I am allowing for the allegro/speech form of the stem 'idh' before a personal pronoun, as well as that they did not have as strong broad/slender distinction there as I suppose it was not as important. I also suppose they could only have the plain n as they dont retain all the 4 n sounds there, so a plain n was normal there anyway.

In the National Park (sorry I have a head cold and cannot concentrate well, so cant recall all the details) from Gweedore (the man in the wool showcase talking about weaving) was very obvious in his broad and slender for genitive (crá a scadáin for herringbone was so clear even the Welsh man got it. He said "what was a scadán" and then said the phrase int he genitive).

Jonathan told me to tell you this a BhRN,

"I won't leave you, we'll always be bestfriends.

:)

Conamara:

According to M. Ó Siadhail, the future of abair is déarfaidh /d'e:r@/
But according to what I heard it's also abróidh /a:bro:/.

Daithí

Riona,
I think he's actually falling out of the ship if anything...

Ni thuigim "with payment" ach if he had just stayed away from the blasted edge this never would have happened, shame to him.

Beir bua agus beannacht

A Bhirn, If you were talking about the verb "to do" in the future and not about the verb "to say", it's ok. The verb "to do" is always lenited in its independent form (ie. not preceded by an eclipsing particle) in Ulster Irish, that's just normal in that dialect.

However, most other verbs don't, that's why I was surprised when you talked about the verb "to say" but maybe you were mixed up.

Ya, I must have been mixed up. I was fairly bad with the cold when I wrote it, so god help the stats I was calculating at at the same time...