Appendix talk:Irish pronunciation

Note at pronunciation of /a/ in Cois Fharraige

@Mahagaja, I don't agree with this. What's the point of showing dialect-specific pronunciation if it doesn't show the major pecularities of pronunciation in that dialect? Of all the differences that exist between the dialects, why do you only want to not include this one? Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 21:54, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

I guess because it seems like a lot of trouble for no benefit. I try to group like pronunciations together as much as possible, for simplicity of reading, but if we follow de Bhaldraithe's lead in marking every historical short (e)a(i) as long for CF, then CF will need its own line in the pronunciation section of every such word. And I just don't think anyone at all benefits from being told, for example, that baiste is pronounced /ˈbˠaʃtʲə/ everywhere except CF, where it's /ˈbˠaːʃtʲə/. Especially since, deep down, I strongly suspect—but can't prove—that there's no audible difference between the CF pronunciation and everyone else's pronunciation, but rather that de Bhaldraithe was being overly sensitive to the fact that low vowels tend to be pronounced longer than nonlow vowels. Even in most accents of English, hat has a longer vowel than hit, but that doesn't mean we should transcribe the former as /hæːt/. —Mahāgaja · talk 16:14, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

Assume for the sake of argument that CF pronunciation does differ from the rest of Galway. Do we need a CF pronunciation for every word? I don't necessarily think so if the pronunciation only differs in a predictable way, as it does with [æ] and [æː]. The main reason why I add CF pronunciations is that there the reference works are comprehensive and good. I don't know of a reference work for Conamara Theas for instance and I don't trust myself to infer the pronuncation from what I do know.

But irrespective of that, it isn't just De Bhaldraithe who says that the /a/-phoneme is long in CF. You can clearly hear it in the recordings in Ó Siadhail's Learning Irish. You can hear it in the recordings at focloir.ie (e.g. fear, although we don't know where exactly the speakers are from). It's also what it says in Raymond Hickey's The dialects of Irish and can clearly be heard in the accompanying audio recordings (I was finally able to check them just now).

If you think we should stick to a somewhat more general Galway pronunciation and you have a good source/method we can use, I'm ok with that, but if we decide to add a CF pronunciation to a lemma it should have [aː]/[æː], because anything else would be misleading in my view. —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 22:53, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't deny that the /a/ phoneme is phonetically long in CF, but I doubt very much it's phonemically long, and for a dictionary entry it's phonemes that are important. And it's true there's very little available for the rest of Galway, which is why I try to use CF as a stand-in for all of mainland Galway (Aran being rather different and closer to Munster in some respects), but I don't think stripping the /a/s and /æ/s of their long marks to do so is any more drastic than, say, converting de Búrca's unstressed /e i o u/ to /ə/ (see the note at {{R:ga:Tourmakeady}}) to bring his idiosyncratic transcription into line with what everyone else does. Another way I try to unify IPA transcription is to use /tʲ dʲ/ for slender t and d in all dialects, even though strictly speaking that's correct only in Munster; the Connacht and Ulster pronunciation is more like /t̠ʲ d̠ʲ/ (or even /t̠͡ɕ d̠͡ʑ/ for most of Mayo and Donegal). —Mahāgaja · talk 08:05, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

About those //-s, shouldn't we be using []-s, since what we're talking about here is how words are uttered, not their underlying structure? Not that I'm against giving a phonemic form too. But the underlying form doesn't differ much between dialects does it? So giving three of them is mostly redundant. —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 09:14, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

For dictionary purposes, I consider // to represent a phonemic level that's not particularly deep. I think it should abstract away from phonetic detail that's so predictable and surfacey that most speakers don't even notice they're doing it (like aspiration of voiceless stops at the beginnings of words), but not go so deep that you have to have studied phonological theory to understand it (e.g. representing short vowels with archiphonemes like /I/ and /E/ that are underspecified for backness, since the distribution of [ɪ] vs. [ɨ̞] vs. [ʊ] and [ɛ] vs. [ʌ] vs. [ɔ] is largely predictable). I do think /.../ is appropriate for showing the level of representation that speakers are generally aware of and learners should aim for, neither including so much phonetic detail that we lose the forest for the trees nor going so abstract that readers will be baffled and/or misled. (To switch to examples from other languages, I would say a transcription like [kɻ̊ʷĩːm] for English cream is too much phonetic detail, and /ɡʁaːz/ for German Gras isn't enough.) —Mahāgaja · talk 09:39, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

@Caoimhin ceallach: As a compromise, how about marking the CF low vowels as /a æ/ and [aː æː], as I've just done at dealg? That way we show that the low vowels are phonetically long in CF without implying that they're phonemically long. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:17, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea to (also) use [] for words where the phonetic representation is different than the underlying one. For dealg I wonder though, isn't the phonemic representation the same for all dialects? It seems inconsistent to use /æ/ for Connacht, when it's not listed among the vowel phonemes and is entirely conditioned by the flanking consonants. The only possible point of divergence may be for /lˠ vs. l̪ˠ, but listening to the sound files of The dialects of Irish I doubt whether even Donegal Irish makes that distinction today. So can't we could use /ˈdʲal̪ˠəɡ/ for all? I'm not a phonologist, so I find it difficult to say how this should be handled on the whole, but I am quite sure that there should at least be a representation which is quite close to surface level. —Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 18:25, 21 November 2024 (UTC)