I'm learning the Cois Fhairrge dialect with O Siadhail's Learn Irish.He says that all plural endings are pronounced with an ì whether the word has it or not.Is it pronounced the same way as with the official standard.

Where does he say that? I can't find it in my edition. If you turn to Appendix III (p. 235), you can see that he gives many examples of plurals which don't involve í. He gives full pronunciations of the twelve nouns introduced in Lesson 2 and only half of them involve /i:/; the other half are forms like boird /baurd'/, doirse /dors'ə/, fir /f'ir'/, etc.

Na hiolraí seo a chríochnaíonn le guta atá i gceist aige, is dócha:

-anna(í)
-acha(í)
-óga(í)

That extra -í is typical of the dialect, not necessarily of the standard.

quote:

I'm learning the Cois Fhairrge dialect with O Siadhail's Learn Irish.He says that all plural endings are pronounced with an ì whether the word has it or not.Is it pronounced the same way as with the official standard.

No, you misread that I believe. In lesson 2, Ó Siadhail says precisely that only plural forms of more than one syllable ending in –cha, -nna, -nta, -óga, add an extra i: sound. The pronunciation of these special plurals is not reflected in the spelling of the book because the author decided to stick closer to the Standard language spelling which does not have this feature. As Dennis said, it’s only a dialectal thingy and it is not part of the Official Standard Irish. However, Ó Siadhail does depart from the Official spelling on a few occasions in the book. Read the section called Appendix III: The Spelling in this Book and Official Standard Irish , he tells you all about this.

I hope this helps! Feel free to ask more questions on this board as the people around here are nice and more than happy to answer you. I’m struggling myself with LI (presently at lesson 20) and I know how at times this book can be daunting with it’s very dense grammar and ‘dry presentation’. I actually gave up studying it at some point due to a lack of motivation and college interfering. Still, I think it’s a great book, probably the best one out there and I encourage you to pursue your study of Gaeilge with LI! Keep it up!

Tá ceist agam oraibh. I’ve always wondered to what extent in general this feature was present in Gaeilge. Is it even widespread in the Connacht dialect? What other dialects have these added long i plurals, if any at all?

Ó Siadhail discusses this variation on pages 140-1 of Modern Irish. He says of the /i:/ extension: "[I]t would appear that it is more widespread in the north" and illustrates this with examples from Erris, Gweedore, and Rosmuck as well as Cois Fhairrge. I don't recall coming across it in my sources on Munster varieties.

I'd say only Munster speakers don't add i/'s to the plural endings (actually, in Ulster we don't always add a i/ to -acha)... Connachta and Ulster do, most of the time.

I wonder why O/ Siadhail didn't choose to write these -achai/, -ntai/ etc, since he had chosen not to write in the standard spelling...

Ní fhéadaim ciall ná cúis d'fhionn ann cathain a ghéilleann Ó Siadhail don Chaighdeán agus cathain a dh'fhágann sé uaidh.

Ni/ fhéadann, na/ mise ach an oiread... Ina dhiaidh sin is fear cliste é agus is teangeolai/ eolach é... mar sin cha dtuigeam dé mar a roghnaigh sé 'n do/igh a scri/obhann sé ins an leabhar sin.