Phonetic shape

General discussion

The inflection of the verb is affected by the use of various morphological and syntactic devices:

1. (a) Broadening of a root final consonant, e.g. bualadh ‘hitting’ beside buail ‘hit!’, siúl ‘walking’, siúil ‘walk!’;

2. (b) Addition of an ending to signify person, number etc., e.g. cuirim ‘I put’, from cuir ‘put!’;

3. (c) Placing before the verb an element which carries grammatical information other than person, number etc., e.g. (do) chuir (M) ‘put’ (past);

4. (d) Use of personal pronouns which are also found outside the verbal system to denote person, number etc., e.g. cuireann muid (C, D) ‘we put’;

5. (e) Use of periphrasis where a verbal noun is unmarked for person, number and tense, which are then attached to an auxiliary verb, e.g. tá sé ag bualadh ‘he is hitting’.

There is no absolute distinction between morphology and syntax. Those listed as (a) and (b) above are largely morphological while (e) is generally regarded as syntactical. This section deals with the morphological or inflectional side of matters; the use of periphrasis by which certain features of aspect and passivity are expressed by auxiliary verbs will be discussed in 11.3.

My thanks are due first and foremost to my wife Bríd, whose help and support was, as always, immeasurable. I owe a debt of gratitude to three friends and colleagues, Dr. Pádraig de Brún, on whose advice and assistance I so often relied, to Dr. James McCloskey for his detailed comments on the text and his unstinting support and to Dr. Arndt Wigger with whom I co-authored Córas Fuaimeanna na Gaeilge, which underpins Parts I and II of the present work which he also kindly read and commented on.

My gratitude is also due to the readers for the Cambridge University Press for their many useful comments and recommendations, to Penny Carter for her editorial assistance and help, to her successors Marion Smith and then Judith Ayling, and to Catherine Max.

I should also like to thank Paul O'Loughlin Kennedy and Sharon Slowey of Dublin Online Typographic Services Ltd. for their skill and efficiency in typesetting.

Broad aims

This book is an attempt to provide a reasonably comprehensive overview of modern Irish dialects outlining both their shared linguistic structure and their diversity. It is hoped that it may prove useful both to those whose main field of concern is the study of the Irish language and to those whose primary interest is linguistic. In order to ensure a balance between the interests of both students of Irish and those of general linguistics an excess of terminology has been avoided, a number of basic concepts are explained and some background information on the Irish language is provided.

Historical background

Irish, which belongs to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family, is thought to have been introduced to Ireland by the invading Gaels – about 300 B.C. according to some scholars. Subsequently this Gaelic language extended to Scotland and the Isle of Man. Scottish Gaelic and Manx became distinct from Irish in the seventeenth century and more gradually from each other. Gaelic may be used as a cover-term for all three languages.

The continuum of the written development of Irish is generally divided by scholars into four periods: Old Irish (c. A.D.600-900); Middle Irish (c. 900-1200), Early Modern Irish (c. 1200-1600) and Modern Irish. During the development Irish borrowed vocabulary from languages which impinged on it, including Latin, Norse, Spanish, Anglo-Norman (a dialect of French) and English.

Semi-vowels

Some sounds in Irish have a very limited usage in actual pronunciation. A good example is the fact that /Y/ is needed only initially in Irish (as opposed to Scottish Gaelic where it is found non-initially). Another example is the fact that while slender dh/gh/j/) and slender ch /x′/ are found initially in all dialects, only in Donegal and Connacht are slender dh/gh /j/) and slender c h/ x′/ necessary medially. Yet despite the restricted occurrence of such sounds in actual pronunciation, an underlying broad dh/gh /Y), slender dh/gh /j/), broad bh /w/ and broad mh /w/ are required in order to explain the relationship which exists between certain forms.

Slender fricatives

Here the conversion of a semi-vowel slender ch /x′/ or slender bh/mh /v′/ to /j/ is our main concern; but the further change dh/gh /j/ to /g′/ is also discussed.

Treatment of slender ch /x′/ and slender dh/gh /j/). The various developments of slender ch /x′/ and slender dh/gh /j/ in the major dialects are illustrated in Table 4.1.

In summary it can be said that slender ch /x′/ either must be preserved as in cloiche /klox′ə/ (D, Mo) or be changed to /h/ as in cloiche /klohə/ (M) or be changed to /j/ following an unstressed vowel. Conversely, slender dh/gh /j/ is changed to slender ch /x′/ as in cruaidh /kruːəx′/ (Mo).

The noun is discussed in this chapter under three headings, Gender (see Ó Siadhail 1984b:173-7), Inflection and Formation of the plural. While gender, case and number are distinct features, sections 7.1-7.3 also show that they are also inextricably interconnected.

Gender

Single gender

Parallels are often drawn between the relationship of natural time to tense and that of biological sex to gender. Despite some obvious exceptions such as stail (fem.) ‘stallion’ and cailín (masc.) ‘girl’, where morphological patterns override biological distinctions, Irish has a close correspondence between sex and gender. In general nouns describing males – either humans or higher animals - are masculine, e.g. fear (masc.) ‘man’, tarbh (masc.) ‘bull’. Furthermore, occupations historically associated with men are normally masculine, e.g. sagart (masc.) ‘priest’. Conversely, nouns describing females are generally feminine, e.g. bean (fem.) ‘woman’, cearc (fem.) ‘hen’.

The general correspondence of sex with gender is overruled by certain word-endings, some of which may function as final morphemes, e.g. -as, -án, -an, -ín, -(e)adh, -(e)amh. The type of endings (with a few exceptions) listed in (1), the agent suffixes in (2) and the suffix -ch in derivatives of place-names or surnames as illustrated in (3) all determine that a noun is masculine.

There are four chapters in Part I. This chapter sketches the approach to the phonology and explains some terms such as ‘underlying form’, ‘derivation’, ‘surface form’ and the distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ rules. In Chapter 2 there is a brief general account of the syllable, how it may be arranged and how the accent is distributed. Chapter 3 deals with vowels and their development in certain circumstances and Chapter 4 discusses the treatment of semi-vowels and consonants.

The approach

While Part I deals with the sounds of Irish and how they change and are affected by their environment, there are inevitably innumerable minor differences from locality to locality in the actual phonetic realization of particular sounds. The account, however, is concerned with a more abstract level in order to attempt to describe the relationship within the underlying sound system and in doing so to specify the outstanding differences between the major dialects. (For a distinctive feature analysis of the Irish sound system see Ó Siadhail and Wigger 1975:14.)

The approach to the various phonological rules is a dynamic one and hence naturally the order in which they apply can be of importance. This means that the ordering of these rules is often adverted to in the course of the discussion. The distribution or the order in which a particular rule applies is often what constitutes a difference between the major dialects.

Introduction

In this chapter, we shall address questions purely internal to French concerning vowel length, the distribution of the mid vowels, and the distribution of the two as. From a pragmatic perspective, we shall also try to establish a number of useful correlations between the pronunciation of the mid and open vowels and their representations in the orthography.

Vowel length

It is a general phonetic fact across languages that, all else being equal, vowels are longer in front of voiced consonants than in front of voiceless consonants. For example, in English, the nucleus of the diphthong [at] is longer in ride and rise than in rite and rice. Likewise, in French, the vowel [a] is longer in rade ‘anchorage’ than in rate ‘spleen’. This type of distinction does not require any particular effort in the acquisition of English or French pronunciation, because it is a universal phenomenon.

There exist in French, however, specific cases of vowel lengthening which go beyond universal tendencies. As a rule, French vowels can be lengthened in this specific way only if they are both stressed (thus, normally in the final syllable of a word) and in a closed syllable.

Introduction

The phonetic study of a language presupposes that one can refer to its sounds without ambiguity; in other words, a system of representation is required where a given sound is always associated with the same symbol and where a given symbol is always associated with the same sound. Because there is no such systematic correspondence between orthography and pronunciation in French, it is necessary for our purposes to resort to a special notation which fulfills this condition (a single symbol for a single sound). The goals of this chapter are to introduce the system of phonetic transcription used in this book (that of the International Phonetic Association) and to justify its use by sketching out the complex nature of the relation between orthography and pronunciation in French.

Phonetic notation

Every language uses a fixed and restricted number of sounds which are assembled into syllables which in turn form words. In French, there are 35 sounds (17 consonants, 15 vowels, and 3 glides), which will be represented by the symbols in square brackets given in Tables 1.1–3. Each symbol is accompanied by three key-words where the letters corresponding to the phonetic value of the symbol are italicized. These phonetic symbols are taken from the inventory recommended by the International Phonetic Association (see Appendix A). They are commonly used in linguistics, together with some variants linked to different traditions.

Introduction

Liaison in French is comparable to certain phenomena which occur in English. For example, the English indefinite article is a before a word beginning with a consonant (a book) and an before a word beginning with a vowel (an old book). In some English dialects (for instance British English), words which end in a ‘vowel + r’ sequence in the orthography (for example, far, never) are pronounced without a final [r], unless the next word begins in a vowel (compare far [fα:] and far away [fα:rǝwe], never [nεvǝ] and never again [nεvǝrǝgen]). The absence/presence of these consonants [n] and [r] in English is, on a reduced scale, similar to the pervasive phenomenon of liaison in French, where ordinarily silent word-final consonants may be pronounced before vowel-initial words (see Table 11.1).

In Chapter 5 (Section 5.7), liaison was briefly considered in its interaction with nasal vowels. The goal of this chapter is to take a closer and more comprehensive look at liaison. We shall first present a cursory history of the phenomenon, and then a fairly detailed examination of the conditions under which liaison (or linking) consonants may occur. We shall close the chapter on a set of practical rules which foreign students can use as convenient guidelines for their own speech.

The following text is taken from the pamphlet entitled The Principles of the International Phonetic Association, published by the International Phonetics Association (1949 edition).

A short history of the Association Phonétique Internationale