Feilidh-Mhor pronunciation

[OC Richard]

"feilleadh beg" pronounced "fell-ugh beck".

Alan, the "L" being slender, I would expect a "Y" offglide. No?

My teacher back in college was careful that I pronounce eile (other, another, next) with that y-offglide, anyhow, more or less like 'ail-yuh'.

[neloon]

Richard, I don't know of any dialect where this happens - eile is just 'ale-uh'.
Alan

[robbiethepiper]

Quite right OC Richard, and if you go to the pronouncing dictionary at www.learngàidhlig.net/dictionary the pronunciation is confirmed. However, as Neloon

points out eile is always, these days, pronounced ell-uh, showing once again that the 'rules' are less than perfect!

[neloon]

Richard,
As Robbie hints, Gaelic pronunciation and orthography are riddled with inconsistencies and dialect variations. For example, how could we have had so ('here') for a word pronounced 'shaw'? The Scottish Qualifications Authority has now ordained that so is wrong and must be replaced by seo. Likewise, de should(?) be pronounced 'jay' but the majority Lewis pronunciation i.e. 'day' has become the usual. Amendments to the orthography haven't yet come at anything like perfect conventions. That's without beginning to think about borrowed words; is the plural of 'computer' na coimpiutairean or (majority view) na coimpiutairs?!!

Alan

[OC Richard]

My old teacher spoke of the existence of numerous dialect differences, the only example I can recall is bord (table) being masculine in some places, feminine in others.

What confuses me is that the "L" in eile and feileadh are slender, yes? The spelling suggests it, anyhow. Perhaps medial "L" is always pronounced broad nowadays?

[neloon]

Richard,
Looking back (post #2), I noticed that I had typed "feilleadh beg" (now corrected) which would certainly give an "off-glide" and I am not saying that there are no speakers who use this pronunciation. This underlines the difficulty of deriving pronunciation from spelling when the spelling was developed to reflect non-standard pronunciation. (The same problem exists in Scots.) Added to this, there are "styles" of Gaelic - biblical/religious, official/journalistic, poetic, the pidjin Gaelic of the playground ("really math"!)* etc. Although it doesn't help with pronunciation, this might interest you
http://www.sqa.org.uk/files_ccc/SQA-...tions-En-e.pdf
Alan
*So we may eventually have the new Gaelic word "riallaidh"!

[robbiethepiper]

Certainly both are preceded and followed by slender vowels so must be slender, so both should be followed by the 'y-glide' as in the English 'million'

However ell-uh is easier to say than ell-yuh so I guess became the norm among native speakers who had never heard of 'the rules'. Let us not forget that,

although Gàidhlig is now boldly resurgent among the urban educated middle classes, It was until quite recently an orally-transmitted, dying language of, at best,

semi-literate poor crofters.

Robbie

P.S. Riallaidh like the new word. A glance through any dictionary will show an abundance of 'Gàidhlig-ised' English words. Sadly, perfectly adequate Gàidhlig words

often fall out of use as part of this process

[neloon]

Sadly, perfectly adequate Gàidhlig words

often fall out of use ...

Agreed. One that annoys me is rum instead of seomar. But then seomar was borrowed from Scots chaumer which was borrowed from French chambre and so it goes on! Maybe we're getting off-topic.
Alan

[OC Richard]

A glance through any dictionary will show an abundance of 'Gàidhlig-ised' English words. Sadly, perfectly adequate Gàidhlig words

often fall out of use as part of this process

I've been guilty of that, when I referred to a plastic chair as cathair phlastaig, just grabbing the English word out of need. Our teacher laughed out loud and said that sort of the thing happens all the time.