When I put these 3 forms (nominative/accusative/dative singular, genitive singular, nominative/accusative/genitive/dative plural) through the synthesizer at abair.ie, the 't' in the first and last forms sounds like t^ch (as in 'patch') to my English-Canadian ears, but not in the middle one.

I understand why the t^ch - the 'i' and 'e' surrounding the 'nt' makes the latter slender, and slender 't' sounds like 't^ch', at least in Ulster.

But I don't understand why the same doesn't apply to the genitive singular múinteoira. I realize that unlike the others, the -a ending broadens instead of slenderizing -- if it does anything at all -- but that wouldn't affect the 't' in the middle of the word, would it? After all, it's 5 letters away.

One obvious explanation is that the synthesizer isn't perfect. But if that's not the answer, would someone please explain.

Typos aren't pronounced correctly.
Genitive of múinteoir is múinteora, i.e. without i (not: -eoira)

Lars

They should all be pronounced identically in the syllables containing the slender t. As for the -a ending, it is, according to my understanding, the simple schwa, and so it does not cause changes to preceding consonants, but simply reflects the quality of the preceding. The same sound is spelled -e in other places to reflect slenderness.

(Message edited by seánw on August 17, 2009)

(Message edited by seánw on August 17, 2009)

(Message edited by seánw on August 17, 2009)

The team at abair suggest using Firefox & Kevin Scanell's spellchecker which comes with it to avoid such problems!

Also, it may be a glitch because of how the synthesis is built up from a corupus of spoken words, with interpolation for words not in the corpus.

Putting in sentences rather than words gives a more natural sound.

I tried these:
seo é an múinteoir,
leabhar an mhúinteora,
seo iad múinteoirí

Go raibh maith agaibh, folks. I apologize for the spelling error; I can't tell you how many times I stared at the genitive on An Foclóir Beag and still didn't see that it dropped the 'i'. I tried to install the spellchecker in question, but it didn't work properly and it won't let me reinstall. The problem begins with the fact that although I followed the instructions to install Gaeilge as one of the languages available in Firefox, it shows up under Tools/Options/Languages but not under Tools/Languages. I'll have to straighten that out before I can use the spellchecker or the synthesizer on all Irish websites.

Speaking of the synthesizer on abair.ie, I can click the .wav file and .mp3 links in both Firefox and IE, but the 'Play mp3' button which I find so convenient in IE doesn't work in Firefox. Is that true for everybody, or just me?

quote:

Is that true for everybody, or just me?

I use Firefox, and have no difficulty. But I use the Irish langauge version, i.e. not as an option.

quote:

Speaking of the synthesizer on abair.ie, I can click the .wav file and .mp3 links in both Firefox and IE, but the 'Play mp3' button which I find so convenient in IE doesn't work in Firefox. Is that true for everybody, or just me?

I use English version of Mac Firefox 3.5.2 and it used to work fine by me. I checked after reading about your problem and now I keep getting "EARRÁID" every time I hit the "Déan sintéis" button. Wonder what the problem is now.