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The Daltaí Boards » Archive: 2005- » 2009 (May-June) » Archive through June 12, 2009 » Broad/slender consonants « Previous Next »

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Heidski
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Username: Heidski

Post Number: 24
Registered: 06-2006
Posted on Monday, May 25, 2009 - 03:00 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

Little doubt this subject has been brought up in the past; i havent quite figured out how to best utilize the search function..

So, if it's slender vowels what makes a consonant slender, and broad vowels are what make a consonant broad, why is it that we speak of consonants as if they were born slender/broad when their character is defined only by the vowels sitting next to them. Instead of saying this , for instance, that a consonant is broad when analyzing a word, why not say that the word ends in a slender vowel, etc?

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Breandán
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Username: Breandán

Post Number: 238
Registered: 12-2008


Posted on Monday, May 25, 2009 - 04:15 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

The best way I can think of to explain it is that the sounds existed before the spelling.

It is not that the vowels "make the consonant broad or slender" but that the vowels are used to "show whether the consonant is broad or slender". It is a workaround because there weren't enough individual consonant symbols in Latin to represent all the consonant phoinemes in Irish.

Now, take a word like bád - the "d" is broad, the word doesn't end in a vowel. In the plural báid, the "d" is slender, the "i" is added to represent this change. It's not that the "i" changes the "d"; the "d" changes from broad to slender and the "i" is used to show the change.

Although you can certainly look at it the other way round, it is easier to describe the consonant changing than to describe which vowels come before and/or after it.

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Heidski
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Username: Heidski

Post Number: 25
Registered: 06-2006
Posted on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 - 01:24 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

Good explanation

Thanks Lars

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Yobar23
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Username: Yobar23

Post Number: 7
Registered: 01-2009


Posted on Thursday, June 04, 2009 - 09:41 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

Too bad Irish doesn't use a slender/soft sign and broad/hard sign with the consonants like Russian, then perhaps so many of the vowels could be dropped from a word.

It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world.

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Lughaidh
Member
Username: Lughaidh

Post Number: 2971
Registered: 01-2005


Posted on Thursday, June 04, 2009 - 10:39 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

You can write in phonological transcription:

hig' l'at s'k'r'i:w i dras'k'r'i:w fo:N'o:li:ah əgəs b'ei nə s'imboːl' s'in' ogəd ah N'ial s'a furəst iəd ə l'e:w...

(Thig leat scríobh i dtrascríobh fóineolaíoch agus beidh na siombóil sin agad ach níl sé furast iad a léamh...)

Learn Irish pronunciation here: http://loig.cheveau.ifrance.com/irish/irishsounds/irishsounds.html & http://fsii.gaeilge.org/

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Linnea_cfc32
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Username: Linnea_cfc32

Post Number: 8
Registered: 05-2009
Posted on Friday, June 05, 2009 - 01:32 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

Yobar,
take away many of the vowels? i think they make written Irish more beautiful!

Ní shíocháin go saoirse!

mon the hoops, beir bua!

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Yobar23
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Username: Yobar23

Post Number: 12
Registered: 01-2009


Posted on Saturday, June 06, 2009 - 01:59 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

quote:

take away many of the vowels? i think they make written Irish more beautiful!



Sorry, Linnea, but when it comes to a written language, I'm rather utilitarian, unless it's Arabic script, which is inherently artsy. The written language is a tool for information transmission, and the fewer possibilities for mistakes, the better the transmission. I can read Lughaidh's message above just fine. I'm for leaving the art in language to spoken euphony and song.

It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world.

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Domhnaillín_breac_na_dtruslóg
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Username: Domhnaillín_breac_na_dtruslóg

Post Number: 585
Registered: 04-2008
Posted on Sunday, June 07, 2009 - 01:50 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

The written language is a tool for information transmission, and the fewer possibilities for mistakes, the better the transmission.

I agree, which is why I think replacing full vowel letters with apostrophes would be a disaster. I speak from my experience with Wade-Giles and McCune-Reischauer, two romanisation systems for Chinese and Korean, respectively. They share a use of apostrophes to show aspiration so, for instance, t'ien¹ is "heaven" whereas tien¹ is "top". Unfortunately, their proper use is poorly understood and, as a result, they are often omitted or misplaced. I've seen them appear in literally every position within a word--including before the first consonant.

You don't see the same kinds of problems with Hanyu Pinyin, where these words would be spelled tiān and diān, respectively. In the same fashion, leat is a much more robust encoding than l'at--even someone weak on the concept of broad and slender isn't likely to write lat, let, or late by mistake. I also like the redundancy in words like cuireann and áitiúil. Flanking the medial consonant with slender vowels makes it far less likely that one will mistakenly pronounce it broad.

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Yobar23
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Username: Yobar23

Post Number: 13
Registered: 01-2009


Posted on Monday, June 08, 2009 - 07:40 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

quote:

I agree, which is why I think replacing full vowel letters with apostrophes would be a disaster. I speak from my experience with Wade-Giles and McCune-Reischauer, two romanisation systems for Chinese and Korean, respectively. They share a use of apostrophes to show aspiration so, for instance, t'ien� is "heaven" whereas tien� is "top". Unfortunately, their proper use is poorly understood and, as a result, they are often omitted or misplaced. I've seen them appear in literally every position within a word--including before the first consonant.



Sounds like the tools are fine, but the users inept in their use. In Russian there is a spelling rule and the use of hard and soft signs. No problems at all knowing which consonants are hard/soft (broad/slender).

quote:

You don't see the same kinds of problems with Hanyu Pinyin, where these words would be spelled tiān and diān, respectively. In the same fashion, leat is a much more robust encoding than l'at--even someone weak on the concept of broad and slender isn't likely to write lat, let, or late by mistake. I also like the redundancy in words like cuireann and áitiúil. Flanking the medial consonant with slender vowels makes it far less likely that one will mistakenly pronounce it broad.



In Russian you have hard vowels (a,e,y,o,u) and soft vowels (ja, je, i, jo, ju) and hard/soft signs for prefixes and/or end of words that end in a consonant. Ljat (soft L because of the following "ja", hard T), curjann (hard K, soft R, hard N), atjul' (soft T, soft L). No problems. ;)

It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world.

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Domhnaillín_breac_na_dtruslóg
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Username: Domhnaillín_breac_na_dtruslóg

Post Number: 594
Registered: 04-2008
Posted on Monday, June 08, 2009 - 08:42 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

Sounds like the tools are fine, but the users inept in their use.

Spoken like a true engineer! The tools are never the problem; it's only "user error" that account for their failure to deliver the proper result. I'm sorry, but if a substantial proportion of your users cannot figure out how to use the tools correctly, then that's a failure of design.

In Russian there is a spelling rule and the use of hard and soft signs. No problems at all knowing which consonants are hard/soft (broad/slender).

But the hard and soft signs are full spacing characters (like Irish vowel letters!), not a diacritic, and they're basically supplementary anyway, seeing as they used only when it isn't possible to show the quality of the consonant by the choice of the following vowel character. That is, the principles underlying the Russian system are the same as those underlying the Irish system, the main difference being that Russian isn't hamstrung by the limited vowel set of the Latin alphabet.

Such a system could be easily adapted for Irish (indeed, I've done just that in order to teach Irish pronunciation to Russian-speaking friends). The main obstacle is the fact that it has at least twice as many vowel phonemes as Russian (and that's before you count diphthongs). You could solve this with diacritics, but that runs afoul of the same design flaws mentioned earlier. I probably see more mistakes in the placement of the sineadh fada than anything else.

For instance, your proposed spelling atjul' suggests *aitiuil rather than correct áitiúil. And curjann might be correct for some dialect, but in all the ones I know the stressed vowel is /i/, not /u/.

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Lughaidh
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Username: Lughaidh

Post Number: 2993
Registered: 01-2005


Posted on Monday, June 08, 2009 - 09:24 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

I think you can say "curann" in Gweedore, so with the /u/ phoneme, but the r is broad too...

Learn Irish pronunciation here: http://loig.cheveau.ifrance.com/irish/irishsounds/irishsounds.html & http://fsii.gaeilge.org/

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Yobar23
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Username: Yobar23

Post Number: 14
Registered: 01-2009


Posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 - 01:53 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

I guess I'm just wishing for a phonetic Irish. And a more consistent use of cases, especially with noun-adjective agreement. Russian works so nicely. ;) I'm happy I didn't have to learn English as a second language.

It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world.

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Domhnaillín_breac_na_dtruslóg
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Username: Domhnaillín_breac_na_dtruslóg

Post Number: 597
Registered: 04-2008
Posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 - 10:39 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

Actually, the current way of writing Irish is damn near phonetic. There are palatal on-glides and off-glides between slender consonants and broad vowels and velar/labial ones between broad consonants and slender vowels--exactly what the script leads you to expect!

For instance, take cuireann. In phonetic notation, this would be ['kˠɪɾʲən̪]. Note the nearly one-to-one correspondence between written letter and phonetic symbol: The u corresponds to a velar onglide (phonetic representation: [ˠ]) and the e to a palatal one ([ʲ]).

I'm not sure what else I can say except that Irish isn't Russian and doesn't work like Russian; it has it's own logic (in both spelling and syntax) and you simply have to discover that. If it's any consolation, you have a tremendous leg up in learning the pronunciation coming from a language with a comprehensive palatalised/non-palatalised (i.e. soft/hard, slender/broad) distinction in the consonants. You probably have a better accent than most English-speaking learners!

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Lughaidh
Member
Username: Lughaidh

Post Number: 2994
Registered: 01-2005


Posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 - 01:11 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

I guess I'm just wishing for a phonetic Irish. And a more consistent use of cases, especially with noun-adjective agreement. Russian works so nicely. ;) I'm happy I didn't have to learn English as a second language.

quote:

['kˠɪɾʲən̪]. Note the nearly one-to-one correspondence between written letter and phonetic symbol: The u corresponds to a velar onglide (phonetic representation: [ˠ]) and the e to a palatal one ([ʲ]).



Actually the [ˠ] doesn't represent the glide, but the fact that the k is velarised. The glide itself would be represented by a [ɰ], so ['kˠɰɪɾ̝ən̪ˠ]

Learn Irish pronunciation here: http://loig.cheveau.ifrance.com/irish/irishsounds/irishsounds.html & http://fsii.gaeilge.org/

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Domhnaillín_breac_na_dtruslóg
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Username: Domhnaillín_breac_na_dtruslóg

Post Number: 599
Registered: 04-2008
Posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 - 01:22 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

Tá an ceart agat, a Lughaidh, rogha níos fearr is ea san. Of course, if you're using [ɰ̯] for the glide you can drop the [ˠ] since it makes no sense to mark velarisation on a segment that's already velar to begin with.

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Lughaidh
Member
Username: Lughaidh

Post Number: 2995
Registered: 01-2005


Posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 - 02:51 pm:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

Yeah, maybe.

Learn Irish pronunciation here: http://loig.cheveau.ifrance.com/irish/irishsounds/irishsounds.html & http://fsii.gaeilge.org/

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Linnea_cfc32
Member
Username: Linnea_cfc32

Post Number: 9
Registered: 05-2009
Posted on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 - 03:11 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

"The written language is a tool for information transmission, and the fewer possibilities for mistakes, the better the transmission. I can read Lughaidh's message above just fine. I'm for leaving the art in language to spoken euphony and song."


True, A Yobar. But I do find written irish beautiful the way it is [:

Ní shíocháin go saoirse!

mon the hoops, beir bua!



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