An bhfuil am ag éinne fogharscríobh a chur ar an sliocht seo de réir an fhuaimnithe i nGaelainn Uladh?

quote:

Istigh i gcreagacha crochta na Beithí
Á cuartú a bhí muid lá marbhánta samhraidh

mo fhreagra:

əsti:ç (nó əsti:) ə g′r′igαχə krɔχtə Nə b′ehi:
α ku:rtu: ə vi: mid′ Lα: mαrəwαNtə sα̃uri:


Fan go dtí go fhreagraíonn Lughaidh air.

[əsˈtɰih ɪ ˈgʲɾ̝agahə ˈkɾɔɾ̥tˠə n̪ˠə ˈbɛhi
a ˈkuərtˠu ə ˈβiː mʷɪdʲ ˈl̪ɰæː ˈmʷɑɾuwɑn̪t̪ˠə ˈsɑ͂w͂ɾi]

Why don't you put it into Abair at http://www.abair.tcd.ie/?page=lts&lang=eng?

It comes out as:

i sˠ t̪ˠ i j # i # ɟ ɾʲ i ɡ a h ə # k ɾˠ o x t̪ˠ ə # n̻ˠ ə # bʲ ai ç iː # aː # k ua ɾˠ t̪ˠ u # ə # vʲ iː # mˠ i dʲ # l̻ˠ aː # mˠ a ɾˠ vˠ a n̻ˠ t̪ˠ ə # sˠ au ɾˠ iː

Níl caill air, ach níl an guta cúnta ag "mˠaɾˠvˠan̻ˠt̪ˠə".

Cibith cha gcuideann sé leat maidir leis an fhuaimniú Chonallach...

Go raibh maith agaibh, a chairde.

Sula bhfágann sibh an t-ábhar seo ceist agam oraibh: an ionann [f] agus f leathan .i. marófar agus [f'] f caol .i. file, feall, srl.

A question regarding the IPA symbols: does [f] represent broad f and [f'] slender f?

[f] and [f'] I would call adapted IPA or Irish IPA. Usually this is found in Irish books. The IPA would be [fˠ] and [fʲ] or sometimes [fʷ]. It depends on the pronunciation because IPA is strictly phonetic, althought there could be narrow and broad transcriptions.

Sorry but f and f' are phonemes. Used in phonology, not in phonetics (the apostrophy means "ejective consonant" and I wonder if ejective f exists, let alone in Irish). Phonological transcriptions are written between slashes. Between square brackets you write phonetics, ie. the sounds just as you hear them. Unlike phonology.
What you call "broad transcription" is what linguists call "phonological transcription", I think...

I understand, Lughaidh, and that is my mistake. /f/ and /f'/ are used in some books in a broad manner. But also the IPA is used in a broad manner like in the Oxford Dictionaries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_transcription#Narrow_versus_broad_transcripti on

Has my question been answered? The f in "cuirfidh mé" sounds like h but what is meant by [f] and [f'] sa bhriathar saor: "dúnfar" / "cuirfear"? Do they just mean the f is pronounced as an f (either f leathan or f caol)and not as a h?

Go raibh maith agaibh.

Seanw the broad transcription of broad f is /fʷ/, not /fˠ/ - the latter is just wrong, as the glide is not the same as with non-labial consonants. I think Lughaidh prefers /ɸʷ/, as historically the f was bilabial and not labiodental (but I think this has disappeared from the Gaeltacht).

Taidhgín it depends on dialect.

In Cork Irish the f in the briathar saor is broad regardless of spelling in the future tense (and slender regardless of spelling in the conditional)


dúnfar: /du:nfər/

cuirfear: /kirʹfər/ (this was spelled curfar by peadar ua laoghaire implying /kurfər/)

dúnfí /du:nfʹi:/
dúntear /du:ntər/
dúntí /du:ntʹi:/
dúnadh /du:nəg/

quote:

Seanw the broad transcription of broad f is /fʷ/, not /fˠ/ - the latter is just wrong

It is a broad transcription. It is not wrong. Just look at the Irish section of the IPA handbook and you'll see a lot of /fˠ/. All it is meant to mean is that it is a "broad f" without noting the type of glide that is present. So you can have for faoi /fˠi:/ and [fʷi:]. /fʷ/ would be the narrow transcription which I guess could be rendered [fʷ] if I am being linguistically correct. I understand your point, though.

quote:

I think Lughaidh prefers /ɸʷ/, as historically the f was bilabial and not labiodental (but I think this has disappeared from the Gaeltacht).

I believe a few pretty old speakers have it, and maybe a few others who try to have it, but I think this has almost completely been lost to the labiodental.

Lughaidh and I have discussed this in the past. He doesn't really believe in "broad phonetic transcription". For him, it's only a "phonetic transcription" if it's as narrow as possible and anything else belongs to a different level of description.

quote:

Seanw the broad transcription of broad f is /fʷ/, not /fˠ/ - the latter is just wrong, as the glide is not the same as with non-labial consonants.

There has been a lot of confusion on this board about what people here call glides. First of all, keep in mind that it is one thing to register that something sets apart "feall" and "fál" (the so called minimal pair) and quite another to try and capture the physics of the distinction. For the first task, it is absolutely irrelevant how you mark this fact. From a theoretical point of view, all these /f/, /f'/, [f], \F\, etc. are void of meaning unless you specify the features that distinguish this something from other such somethings. Thus, from a phonological perspective, these above are just shorthand for feature matrices, so again it's just a question of convension, neither right or wrong.

The physics of the something is an absolutely different matter. There is an illusion that a phonetic transcription is kinda real, but it is not. It is also a highly abstract representation of the physics, different from a phonological representation in that it is built with other principles in mind. It contains some information about some allophonic variation, which is completely redundant from a phonological perspective and most importantly highly subjective. How well does it capture the intuitions about the real thing? - Well, phoneticians prefer other ways of representing the real thing with the help of spectrograms, palatograms, roentgenograms, mel diagrams, and whatnot, i.e. anything that is objective and well understood.


Another thing that adds to the confusion is that people lump together the closely related concepts of (i) short semivowel segments before and after a consonant segment and (ii) secondary articulation on the consonant. The velarisation sign on fˠ marks secondary articulation, if you want to mark an offglide, do so on the line, not as a superscript sign because it makes people think that you assume some fancy co-articulation on this segment. Thus, an IPA fʷ stands for a labialised labiodental... Hm, can you imagine that? Sorry, not in human beings.

Labialisation (wiki)

"Labialisation is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialised sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound."

And another bit:

Secondary Articulation (wiki)

"Although the symbol for secondary articulation is a superscript written after the primary consonant, this is misleading, as they are pronounced simultaneously. Since secondary articulation has a strong effect on surrounding vowels, it will often seem that it precedes the consonant, or both precedes and follows it."

Hope it helps.

(Message edited by Peter on March 18, 2010)

Thank you sincerely, Unregistered Guest. After only sixty plus years spent listening to Irish I realise I may need another sixty to learn all I should know before daring to teach. I never knew that about Cork Irish. I suppose I should select a dialect I know fairly well and study it all over again. I should have been advised to start sooner! Go raibh míle maith agat agus ag gach duine a d'fhreagair mo cheist.

(Now there's a word worth describing in IPA: d'fhreagair :-)

quote:

Lughaidh and I have discussed this in the past. He doesn't really believe in "broad phonetic transcription".

I believe it's possible to make a broad phonetic transcription... Just I seldom saw any! Most of the time, people use a phonological transcription and say it's phonetic because they don't know the difference.

people often assume phonological=broad and phonetic=narrow, but both could be more or less narrow/broad. The difference is that phonology is the sound system, whereas phonetics is the actual sounds.

>>>dúnfar: /du:nfər/

cuirfear: /kirʹfər/ (this was spelled curfar by peadar ua laoghaire implying /kurfər/)

dúnfí /du:nfʹi:/
dúntear /du:ntər/
dúntí /du:ntʹi:/
dúnadh /du:nəg/



I spelled them all wrong. You either, as in the CO, use broad and slender endings regardless of the pronunciation, or like Peadar Ua Laoghaire, append the ending that corresponds to pronunciation regardless of the spelling rule. Using the standard spellings:

Present: dúntar, cuirtear (both pronounced broad t)
Future: dúnfar, cuirfear (both pronounced broad f)
Past: do dúnadh, do cuireadh (both pronounced broad g)
Conditional: dhúnfaí, chuirfí (both pronounced slender f)
Imperfect: dhúntaí, chuirtí (both pronounced slender t)

In traditional Cork Irish, the autonomous form was never lenited in any tense, so dúnfaí and dúntaí, cuirfí and cuirtí would be right, but I believe this rule is no longer adhered to.

Another interesting thing is that "rt" can be pronounced "rh". Cuirtear=cuirthear. It would be interested to know what % of people in Músgraí follow this.

I am sure most people on this site know, but for the purpose of completeness: the autonomous form and the conditional 2nd person singular are the only ones where the f is pronounced like f and not like h: cuirfí, do chuirfeá. The f of the conditional 2nd person singular is another interesting thing: always broad in Cork, regardless of the spelling: do chuirfeá /də xirʹfɑ:/.

/dʹrʹagirʹ/

Thank you again, Unregistered Guest. That word "d'fhreagair" has significance for me. On the way home from the pub -- more than thirty years ago -- I found myself in a car full of older bachelors all native speakers of Irish. Needless to say "the craic was mighty" with old songs being sung and plenty of banter. It was in that context that I elicited the answer "Yes" or "D'fhreagair" to my question "Agus ar fhreagair sé thú?". I was almost astonished to hear how the language worked among men like these whose first language Irish was. The answer was chrystal clear and so illustrative of the pronunciation as it should be if we only knew the language as well as they. Go ndéana Dia trócaire orthu most of them have passed away.

I wonder do other dialects diverge considerably from the Cork dialect in such pronunciation? Dare I ask you for your view of the pronunciation offered or suggested in An Foclóir Póca?

FP has /dʹrʹagərʹ/
South Ulster has /dʹrʹigər/ (ea is i before g)

(Message edited by seánw on March 19, 2010)

Phonology : /d'r'agir'/ or /d'r'agərˈ/

realised

(phonetics) : [ˈdʲɾ̝agɰɪj] (Gaoth Dobhair)

quote:

(phonetics) : [ˈdʲɾ̝agɰɪj] (Gaoth Dobhair)

What is a raised flap, Lughaidh? Can you point me to some literature on that one? From what I just read on wiki, a raised flap is actually a stop. I strongly suspect that your intention was to mark a trilled fricative, so you should've picked a primary symbol for a trill.

There are some other weird or at least dubious things in your transcription (like your labialised labial mʷ, to name only one) that I suggest you should really work out some sensible principles first, otherwise it's just a mess.

(Message edited by peter on March 20, 2010)

It isn't a trill. I don't think you can pronounce a raised trill...
mʷ means a m with more rounded lips. Actually you hear like a very short w sound after it, that's why I use that symbol.
I don't use the IPA symbols at random, you know.

quote:

It isn't a trill. I don't think you can pronounce a raised trill

Relative articulation (wiki):

quote:

Czech, on the other hand, requires the opposite: Its fricated trill, which is a separate phoneme, may be transcribed as a raised trill, [r̝].

If you read further, there's a passage on what you get if you use the raising / lowering symbol:

quote:

From most open (least stricture) to most close (most stricture), there are several independent relationships among speech sounds. Open vowel > mid vowel > close vowel > approximant > fricative > plosive is one; flap > stop is another; and trill > (trilled) fricative yet another.

This means that an uptack under a primary symbol changes it into the next member (or close to it) in a relation as defined above. Your raised flap ɾ̝ is simply a voiced plosive of the same place of articulation, namely d.

quote:

mʷ means a m with more rounded lips. Actually you hear like a very short w sound after it, that's why I use that symbol.

If you hear a short w sound, why don't you transcribe it as a short w sound and not as the secondary articulation of labialisation on the consonant?! I bet you anything that acoustically a bilabial with lips protruding as far out as possible will be only negligibly different from a canonical m (regardless of the fact that labialisation on bilabials is ruled out by definition)! I told you that before, but you don't care.

(Message edited by peter on March 20, 2010)

The raising of a consonant is a relative thing. It may be more or less raised. If it is too much raised, it can't be trilled because your tongue can't manage to vibrate... That's what happens with Irish slender r.

The "short" w is lighter than a regular w, so I use the small w symbol. It's not a full w.

What symbol would you use for the slender r in Irish?
To me it's a tap and it's raised to I use the symbol that correspond to that. I may be wrong, of course, but so far I couldn't find a better symbol to represent the irish slender r...
I saw [ɾʲ] in some books but when I pronounce that sound it isn't the sound of the slender r, so I tried to find another symbol...

Grma

South Ulster Irish died out a long time ago. South Ulster therefore has not /dʹrʹigər/ but /ri'plɑid/.

What I mean by south Ulster is south Donegal, Donegal being the only Ulster county that is really vibrant right now. And yes, it has /dʹrʹigər/ as at least one of the pronunciations.

I thought you meant Monaghan... I believe some Ultonians are bringing South Ulster Irish back to life - but that normally refers to someone other than Donegal.

A

Scríobh tú: /ri'plɑid/

Cheap mé ar dtús go raibh tusa ag kiddeáil linn ach tá ciall leis anois. B)

IPA transcriptions are the last thing I care about. If I tell you that Connemara Irish L in "don Luan" is velarised, pharyngealised, labialised and nasalised, will you be adding it all into your IPA transcriptions?

I'm pretty sure if need be, you can find a lot of literature on the articulation and acoustic properties of Irish: there's a whole bunch of computational linguists working on abair.ie, surely they have pinned down all the key allophones of slender r'.

There's a "short" mark in IPA if you need it.

Also, it looks like IPA uses superscript w for both pure labialisation and labiovelarisation. I personally hate notational ambiguities. So, what do you mark with your w then?

Plus, I should've checked it earlier, Ladefoged & Maddieson have labiovelarisation on bilabials, which is something I still find odd as primary articulation is thus allowed to overlap with secondary articulation. This thing needs to be further clarified.