Re: some more Irish vowels


Ar an t-ochtú lá déag de mí na Nollaig, scríobh Brian M. Scott:

On Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:19:08 +0100, Aidan Kehoe wrote:

Ar an seachtú lá déag de mí na Nollaig, scríobh Brian M. Scott:

> [...] The one example that I can find is her reference example, the
> first vowel of <ola> 'oil'; she gives the word as [Vl[~@] (turned-v,
> dental lateral with velarizing superscript, schwa).

That works as a phonemic transcription, but I wouldn’t use it for a
phonetic one. An old-fashioned RP [V] in that would sound distinctly
odd.

On the chart she places it 2/3 of the way from [E] back to [V] on the
standard IPA quadrilateral, if that makes a difference. What would you
use for your pronunciation of the word? Ó Siadhail, _Learning Irish_,
makes it /o/, but I think that he means [o], or perhaps '[o], but this is
a broad transcription'.

Heh, for my pronunciation of the word, I can’t really be certain. My
pronunciation of English, even, is inconsistent, and while I haven’t known
it for much longer than Irish, it is by far the better-established language
in my head. I fear I would do some English-speaker diphthongisation for a
week or so before I got my consistent accent together, were I in an
environment where I was speaking Irish regularly.

Anyway, the podcast at http://anlionra.com/mp3/lionra-2006-11-02.mp3 has the
following question at 0:45 (and note that the other speaker has a notable
middle-class English-speaker accent, so it’s not how he speaks that Ní
Chasaide is describing):

“I dtús báire, caithfidh mé cheist a chur ort, cad is brí leis an focal
seo, ‘digital rights’ nó ‘cearta digiteacha’?”

I hear the (un-rhotic version of the) ‘chur’ vowel as being identical to the
first vowel of ‘focal’, which for me is also the first vowel of ‘ola.’
They’re both where I would put the vowel of ‘puck’ as I say it; not where
I’d put the vowel of (north?) German ‘Druck,’ and not where the vowel of an
old-fashioned RP ‘puck’ is. I would probably use something ad-hoc to
represent the vowel, were I to write a textbook, since I would be aware that
(again, possibly north) Germans would read it in terms of the language they
grew up with.

It’s not [o]. [ʌ] is much closer to it than [o]. It’s not even remotely
[ɔ]. Transcribing it as /o/ to someone who doesn’t speak the language
already would be no help at all, IMO.

--
When I was in the scouts, the leader told me to pitch a tent. I couldn't
find any pitch, so I used creosote.
.

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