Language desk
< December 9	<< Nov \| December \| Jan >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 10[edit]

Irish pronunciation[edit]

Why do some Irish people pronounce the word "drink" as "thrink"? 86.187.229.140 (talk) 23:07, 10 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, they don't. They pronounce it as "drink". But from your perspective, it apparently sounds like "thrink". Accents are difficult to describe. They are in the eye of the beholder. I have two questions. Where is your accent/version of English pronunciation from? And do you have a link to a sample of the pronunciation so we could hear what you mean? HiLo48 (talk) 23:35, 10 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Never heard of that. Maybe the OP can find a YouTube of it somewhere. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:42, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Here's The Irish Rovers singing about drinking. It sounds normal enough.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:29, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In fact, it's characteristic of most accents in Ireland (at least in the Republic) that "th" is usually pronounced (when speaking English) more or less as as "d" or "t": this stems from there being no "th" sound in Irish. As an example, the town in County Tipperary where I once holidayed is written as Thurles in English but written and pronounced Durlas in Irish – I have to hand the Ordnance Survey map from that holiday where both names are thus shown, as are English and Irish names for most towns.

Strange as it may seem to native speakers of English (and also Welsh and Greek), the "th" sound only exists in a minority of European languages.

(The above is only a crude overview based on my lay interest in languages – no doubt someone with considerably more linguistic expertise can give a more detailed and nuanced view.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.217.209.178 (talk) 04:26, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

EO discusses "th": "A sound found chiefly in words of Old English, Old Norse or Greek origin, unpronounceable by Normans and many other Europeans."[2] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:49, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

So there are no voiced or unvoiced dental fricatives in the Irish language? Is there any difference between Gaelic-speakers and non-Gaelic-speakers? I must admit that in my experience (Southern) Irish people pronounce "those thistles" as "doze tistles". Martinevans123 (talk) 14:16, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hiberno-English#Consonants discusses exactly thus for Irish speakers of English, to wit "The phonemes /ð/ (as in the) and /θ/ (as in thin) are pronounced uniquely in most Hiberno-English. /ð/ is pronounced as [d] or [d̪], depending on specific dialect; and /θ/ is pronounced as [t] or [t̪]." In terms of the Irish (Gaelic) language (which most Irish people do not speak as a first language, it should be noted), Irish phonology has no dental fricatives, the two "th" sounds present in English are unknown in that language. --Jayron 32 14:48, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And all of this is the opposite of what the OP described. But as HiLo suggested, it could be how the OP is hearing it based on his own language's collection of sounds [even though it's a UK IP]. I worked with someone from India whose name included a "th" which sounded to my American ears like the "t" and "h" were being pronounced separately, as in the expression "wethead". But when I said it that way, they said it sounded wrong. When I said it with the "th" together like a "soft" th (as in with, both, etc.), it sounded wrong to me, but they said it sounded right! Go figure. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:11, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) Thanks for the link. So this is the effect of an English dialect being produced by a different language. I guess Irish people who have never spoken Irish (Gaelic) might find it easier to learn and/or use these two sounds? Are there any English dialects which do pronounce "drink" as "thrink"? Maybe the OP misidentified the origin of the speakers. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:17, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know of any that do; however Hiberno-English dialects are not the only ones to feature Th-stopping; there are several more there. I don't know of any dialect that does it the other way around as the OP asks. --Jayron 32 16:13, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, Father Jack Hackett certainly says "drink!", doesn't he. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:21, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There's a tradition in English of representing Irish speech in the manner suggested by the OP; see e.g. here. I'd regard this more as a convention than an attempt at actual phonetic transcription. Henry ^Flower 09:56, 12 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It's typical of Hiberno-English that /θ/ and /ð/ are pronounced [t̪] and [d̪] respectively, as mentioned above, but it is also characteristic of Hiberno English that /t/ and /d/ are pronounced [t̪] and [d̪] before /r/ and /ər/ (in the same morpheme). Thus, Hiberno-English speakers usually distinguish tin and thin as [tɪn] vs. [t̪ɪn], but tree and three are homophones as [t̪riː], and other and udder are homophones as [ˈʌd̪ər]. However, it is also true that well-educated and otherwise speech-conscious Irish people will work to undo these mergers, because they're aware that the mergers don't exist in other varieties of English and may therefore be stigmatized. —Mahāgaja · talk 17:46, 12 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Does this support in any way what Henry reports above? Perhaps the OP was trying to describe an aspirated consonant. I note that his source dates from 1895 - were accents any different then? Martinevans123 (talk) 19:46, 12 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Here are a couple of references which support both of us: [3] and [4]. The first says the pronunciation referred to is "almost universal". Henry ^Flower 22:09, 12 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]