Wikipedia:Peer review/Irish phonology/archive1

Irish phonology

I'm practically the only contributor of information to this article in the last year and a half or so (most other contributors have only corrected typos, dealt with metainformation like categories and templates, and so forth), so I'd really like some outside input on how I can improve it to bring it up to Good article status. —An gr 18:17, 4 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, AZ _t 02:14, 5 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's a good solid article and I'll gladly certify it as a "good article" if you're interested in that. But to give you some feedback here is a wishlist of things I'd like to know.

The article goes straight from a general lead into a fairly detailed nuts and bolts discussion. Personally I like getting to the meat straight away but some more chatty sections might give the article wider appeal. The lead is also supposed to summarize the article so I sort of expected some overview section later on about the differences between the dialects.

Another idea for a chatty section would be something about the social status of particular dialects or dialectical variations. Assuming, of course, that there's something interesting to say about that.

A few words about the history of the discipline might be worthwhile. When did Irish phonology come to be studied seriously? What are the biggest names in the field? Is Tomás de Bhaldraithe the only notable author in the references list? Is the much-quoted 1899 work by Finck considered a classic?

You say that there is no 'standard' pronunciation of the language. In my experience there often is an unofficial standard pronunciation if you just can ferret it out. What's typically taught to foreign students? For that matter, how is Irish pronunciation typically taught to non-native speaking Irish children in Irish schools? Is there a typical Irish-as-a-second-language-with-English-as-a-first-language pronunciation?

Insofar as the article offers an historical perspective it's mostly Old Irish to Modern Irish. But it might be interesting to know more about what phonological changes, if any, are taking place now or in the recent past. I would also like to have some comparative material with the other Goidelic languages. Has Irish influenced the phonology of Irish English?

The article once tantalizingly alludes to two different phonemic analyses of the vowel system. It would be interesting to know more about differences between the scholars. Is there reasonably general agreement on the phonemic analysis of the language? Are there more abstract newfangled theories?

It would be nice to have sound files, though there are some obvious problems. You offer a close transcription of some sentences in the samples section and someone who comes along isn't likely to reproduce that exactly. But if we transcribe something said by a person who comes along then we might be going into a bit of original research.

You say: "Where a voiced obstruent or /w/ comes into contact with /h/, the /h/ is absorbed into the other sound, which then becomes voiceless". Then you give /ˈsˠkuəpˠəɟ/ (derived from /sˠkuəbˠ/) as an example of this process. You use slashes rather than brackets so these representations belong to the phonemic level - yet, there is no /h/ there at all. Are you postulating an underlying phonemic level which includes /h/?

Are there any minimal pairs where an unaspirated voiceless plosive contrasts with either its voiced counterpart or its aspirated counterpart? If not, then what is the justification for treating the phonemic difference as one of voice rather than aspiration? Haukur 22:37, 5 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for your comments! To give some quick answers:
  1. I don't know of any information about the social status of the various dialects that can be backed up by reliable sources. I've heard it said that Ulster Irish is looked down on by speakers of other dialects, and conversely that speakers of Ulster Irish look down on the written standard (which doesn't reflect Ulster very well at all), but I don't know of any published sources on the question. I'm not even sure where to start looking.
  2. Finck was definitely the first in a series of fieldworkers doing research into the descriptive phonetics and phonology of spoken Irish dialects. Nevertheless, I don't get the impression he's considered a "classic". I'm not really sure why not--in my opinion he ought to be--perhaps because he wrote in German. I do get the impression that Quiggin is considered something of a classic (which I don't understand because I find him almost impenetrable--which is why he isn't cited much in the article), though again I don't have sources describing him as such.
  3. Learners of Irish (whether foreign or English-speaking Irish) are taught whatever dialect their teacher uses. For schoolchildren in the parts of Ireland far removed from the Gaeltacht (such as Dublin) this gets particularly confusing since they generally have a different teacher every year, so they wind up learning an amalgamation of twelve different idiolects rather than one de-facto standard pronunciation. And children from Dublin who grow up as native speakers generally have a mishmash. I know two native speakers who grew up in Dublin, and both of them have a combination of Connemara and Munster characteristics in their speech. Unfortunately, no research seems to have ever been done on Dublin Irish.
  4. For the short vowels, there are two analyses of the underlying pattern: the five-vowel /ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ/ system, and the three-vowel /I E a/ system, where /I/ and /E/ are underspecified archiphonemes that receive their specification for the feature [back] from adjacent consonants. The traditional five-vowel system is generally assumed by descriptive phonologists, and the newfangled abstract three-vowel system by theoretical phonologists (Ó Siadhail, Ní Chiosáin, and me in my dissertation). AFAIK Ó Siadhail was the first to posit a three-vowel system, and in the field of Irish phonology 1989 isn't very long ago, so there hasn't been much time for the descriptivists to respond. Ó Sé (2000), a descriptivist, does still assume five vowels, but doesn't actually deign to argue against the three-vowel hypothesis; he just ignores it instead. There's probably a lot I could say about this issue, but there's not much I can say without delving into original research.
  5. Sound files would be great! To get away from the original research problem, we could hypothetically make a recording of someone reading something in Irish and just provide an orthographic transcription, not a phonemic one. That would then be in addition to what's there right now, which provides orthography and transcription but no sound files. Unfortunately, I don't have ready access to any native speakers, but maybe I could find a Category:User ga-N Wikipedian with a microphone who'd be willing to read aloud a short text (The North Wind and the Sun?) for the article.
  6. I used slashes in /ˈsˠkuəpˠəɟ/ to indicate a broad transcription; at an abstract morphophonemic level it is indeed /sˠkuəbˠ-həɟ/.
  7. Voiceless unaspirated stops do not contrast with either voiced stops or with voiceless aspirated ones. Irish has a system like English or German (but without final devoicing), where the series spelled b d g is usually at least somewhat voiced but not always completely voiced, while the series spelled p t c is always completely voiceless and is usually aspirated in word-initial and stressed-syllable-initial position (but not after s). It is thus unlike Scottish Gaelic, which is more like Icelandic in that the b d g series is always voiceless unaspirated while the p t c series is always aspirated (including being preaspirated in coda position). All published sources treat the difference as one of voicing; while a case could perhaps be made for treating it as a difference of aspiration (with incidental voicing of unaspirated stops between vowels etc.), it would definitely be original research. The only place where there's a lack of unanimity among the researchers is the question of the clusters spelled sp st sc: some say these are /sp st sk/ and the voiceless stops aren't aspirated in that position, while others say these are /sb sd sg/ and the voiced stops are devoiced in that position. I suppose I could mention that.
- —An gr 08:53, 6 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, there does not seem to be a formal '+' addition symbol for adding text, so I will edit-in my reponse. I'm the guy who left the comment on Old irish phonology. My qualifications are in psychology, so I'm not a linguist, but I believe I have something to offer.

O Quiggin gives in 'A dialect of Donegal' almost 20 vowels and 20 diphthongs existant in the older speech only 100 years ago. While a lot has happened in the meantime, and of course, they were not all phonemic, I do think that due to the robust velar(ised) vs palatal(ised) distinction, the situation of consonants both sitting in or near the territory of vowels and passing thru them produces more vowel allophones than the 5 short and five long often postulated (above and beyond glides), and I feel these need to be covered in greater detail, if the object is to enable better pronounciation. The implication from many works on irish, is that there is a poorer vowel set that is actually the case.

If your articles are interested in the decay of the the phonological system, then the loss of fortis and lenis phonemics, particularly in the rhotics, and now, in the ls and ns (liquids as a whole -forgive me if I use out of date terminology). Also the use of labiodentals rather than the native bi-labials.

The article could in time be expanded to show how the grammar and one would suspect, the semantics are been altered to conform with english. Just today I read of the adverb construction 'go luath' been dropped to 'luath' when used in the sense of 'early' as in English the adjective has the same form. That would seem to me a strong influence from english that goes beyond the content of the article.

As for child studies, in the handbook from the Irish Institute for Applied Aplication of Linguistics, "Aqcuisition of Irish as a first language", there is the Donegal man Dónall Ó Baoill from Gweedore, I believe, with a short paper on bring up 2 kids in Dublin as natives. He also produced something about his own boy too, I think (if I can find it).

As for the Dublin prononciation, it is rank. ONe kid on the TG4 cartoon slot, voicing Superman's son, appeared to have no palatal quality at all. I would expect any native english speaker to have some broad and slender qualities, but this guy was so plain in sound it had to be heard to be believed, and in a language such as Irish, it was plain bizzare. You could mention how, to compensate, the whole phonological basis of inflection, in 1st declension nouns mostly, is changed from the consonants to vowel, as there is no dual set to use, so rather than 'rothar' /roh@r/ -->/rohir'/ for the plural and genitive singular, the same approximant is kept in both occasions, but the vowel changes. (Sorry about the transcription, but IPA does not work here).

As for sound files, I could do some till you get a native, as while not been a native, I ahve worked on the sound and it is quite gaelic in character

Thanks for your comments! The goal of the article is not to help anyone improve their pronunciation, but rather to describe known and published facts about Irish phonology, because this is an encyclopedia article, not a pedagogical text. It's true Quiggin described an implausibly high number of vowels for Donegal, and so do most other people who have described Donegal dialects, because they all simply unthinkingly accepted Quiggin's analysis. This is part of the reason why the article explicitly says it's only discussing the vowel systems of Connacht and Munster; the other part being that Connacht and Munster largely agree in their vowels, while the Donegal vowels are rather different (quite apart from the fact that the Donegal authors seem to be incapable of telling the difference between phonemes and allophones). Grammar and semantics fall outside the scope of this article, which is just phonology. There is an article Irish syntax they could be added to instead. Do you know of any published sources about Dublin Irish? I'm afraid personal observation -- however accurate -- can't be used as it violates Wikipedia's policies of no original research and verifiability. —An gr 05:07, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I will search for some published material on Dublin Irish.

"Donegal authors seem to be incapable of telling the difference between phonemes and allophones" -I agree. First time I looked at Wagner on Teilinn, I thought where are all these vowels coming from. However, I think the plan was with O Q. to offer a glimspe at a more greatly phonetic degree of rigour than had been attempted at the time, (maybe barring O Searcaigh, but I dont have his works on me).

Of course, it is not about pedagogy! Also, the comment on Dublin Irish was my own, but it was just a comment, with obviously little range in an organ like this.

Ugh, don't even get me start on Wagner's description of Teelin! He not only has the implausibly high number of vowels like everyone else who describes Donegal, he also doubles the number of consonants because he has this delusion there's gemination in Teelin. —An gr 17:56, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]