Anyone familiar with a cassette tape entitled "Seanchas Aduaidh"? A friend picked it up in Ireland several years ago. It consists of 6 stories read in Ulster Irish by Liam MacCarráin. It was originally sold with an accompanying booklet which I don'ty have.
I would like to find texts of the stories:
An Saighdiúir Cróga
Fada Gairid
An Buidéal Draíochta
An Poll
An Tram Deireannach
An Sparán Cail(l)te

Can't you transcribe it yourself?

An bhfuilir ag magadh? I don't know what it's like for Taig, but understanding connected speech is by far the most difficult challenge for me--i n-aon teanga. I can easily read all manner of things I could never comprehend spoken.

Even for languages I speak well (like English or German), producing a transcription is time-consuming and a real bother. Just the other day, I transcribed a bit of a Dylan Moran sketch and it must've taken me fifteen minutes or so to make a true copy of a three-minute bit.

If I may correction (it just came to me immediately when I saw your reply). You certainly wanted to say:

Ag magadh atá(nn) tú?

An bhfuilir ag magadh? is a calm-face-type of question enquiring about collocutor's current activity. It is not a rhetoric question with a stress on "ag magadh". For that you would want emphasizing bracket:

(Is) ag magadh atá(nn) tú?

I hope this helps

I don't know the tape.

But the tape may say who published it?

That would be a start.

Are you sure they are stories?

I found the following

Liam Mac Carráin. Life 1916- ; b. Belfast; Dánta Aduaidh (Coiscéim 1981)

http://www.coisceim.ie/1981.html

These are aut of print, and I can't find the tiles of the poems.

But "An Tram Deireannach" (The last tram/streetcar) sounds an unlikely title for a folklore story.

Go raibh maith agat, a Róman. Ach tá ciall agat don rud a dheinim iarracht chun rá, ná fuil?

The label reads "Seanchas Aduaidh" le Liam Mac Carráin
Arna fhoilsiú ag: -
Springhill Community House, 123 Springhill Ave., Belfast BT12.
This tape is produced with the help of The Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
I believe the author is the father of Ciarán Carson. The stories may not be folklore but original stories by the author. I had a similar reaction to the word "tram".

quote:

(Is) ag magadh atá(nn) tú?

Recte: An ag magadh atá(nn) tú?

Colloquially questions can be formed just by raising voice, thus "an" can be superfluous. Anyway, I have heard "ag magadh atá(nn) tú?" so many times from native speakers that I can be 100% sure there is nothing in front of "ag".

Róman is never wrong, and in this case he's right, in that there is (most usually) nothing before "ag", but I think Dennis simply omitted to put "An" in brackets. Both are obviously correct: "(Is/An) ag magadh atá tú (!/?)" = "It's/Is it joking you are (!/?)" in Hiberno-English. I think Dennis meant that your "(Is) ag magadh atá(nn) tú?" required not a "?", but a "!". A matter of proper punctuation. But I could be wrong...
Anyway, Róman, I think your "correction" of DLL's post was irrelevant.

quote:

Colloquially questions can be formed just by raising voice

I thought I read that you don't do questions by intonation in Irish.

That's the reason for the "High rising terminal" in Hiberno-English, where you rise your voice in the final syllables of your sentence also in a statement.

Or is this just an ínfluence of standard Béarla, that you stay in the English intonational pattern of your mother tongue? I as a German have also big probems not to raise my voice automatically in every question, even if in a foreign language this prosody is bare nonsense.

quote:

I thought I read that you don't do questions by intonation in Irish.

You don't raise the voice if there "an" and/or urú on the verb, but if the sentence is totally in positive form and nothing gives away a question - you make a question by raising voice like in any other language. This colloquial development, I admit. See this:

(an) bhfuileann tú teinn? (no raising of the voice)
tánn tú teinn?!

Ok, now I understood myself while writing this.

An ag magadh atánn tú? is a question which expects an answer
(is) ag magadh atánn tú?! is not a question, but an exclamation. Nobody expects you answer "tá" to this.

You don't in much of Hiberno-English either -i only inflect my voice when I really want someones attention; most of the time I don't alter that aspect of my voice unless I get excited and a few other things

I commonly have a tiny upswing after a question unless I'm not paying attention or I'm completely uninterested in the question I'm asking, in that case it is flat. Then again upon asking myself trivial things out loud to see what I do I realize that sometimes instead of raising at the end I raise in the middle on the word that is particularly important, such as "do you _like it?" with the emphasis on like and thus the raising of my voice occurring there. Does anyone else do this? So what you're saying is that in Irish it is wrong or uncommon to raise at the end of an "An bhfuil" question? Is it allowed to raise in the middle like I mentioned above?

Beir bua agus beannacht

A lot of Irish questions and in HE of a lot of people is this sort of 'suspicious' tone or like you are thinking something about the person while asking. Listen to Buntus Cainte for some examples.

Yes to the "suspicion inflection." It's not anywhere near as simple as saying it's a mere raising of the final syllable, either. A whole nuance of attitude is introduced by the way the sentence as a whole is inflected.

We do this in English as well, but not so pronouncedly, I think.