What is the IPA/Celticist?

For understanding and describing the phonology of Kilkenny Irish, I will be using phonetic transcription. This means that I will be using a kind of a phonetic alphabet to record what I see and I will use the transcriptions already given in the work I am referencing. There are two main alphabets that should concern the reader of this blog. I will try and explain them both and give reasons as to why.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (or just IPA) is the most common phonetic writing system. It is used internationally in linguistics to transcribe speech and is fairly extensive. It can be extremely specific or very broad and it's purpose as far as I know is basically to work for every human language. I won't go into the history of it or how it works in detail since I don't really have much to add to that topic. I've linked some useful stuff below.

• A handbook and three slideshows from Languishing Linguist used in a seminar of his
• IPA for Language Learning - Vowels (1 of 4), series from Youtuber NativLang
  
• IPA Basics : Place of Articulation, series from Youtuber Artifexion
  
• A keyboard you can use to type IPA characters

IPA vowel chart. It is based on the
shape of the mouth, feel your
 tongue move as you say 'ee' and 'oo' [i:] [u:].
Isn't that cool?

It's really very handy to know how the IPA works. Personally, I would just recommend learning the symbols that are relevant to you. There's no point in staying up all night studying what ɱ, ʛ, ɮ, and ʜ are because you probably won't ever need them (unless you want to do it for fun). Nevertheless, having a rough understanding is absolutely an essential skill for trying to understand the phonology of a language. The charts are laid out in a particular logical way and they will help you to understand how sounds are made in the mouth.

Once you have a basic understanding of the IPA and you start to look at some Irish linguistic work, you will probably notice that the way the language is transcribed is a bit different. That's because there's a different system used for Irish. The IPA wasn't designed specifically for Irish phonology so linguists studying the language in the 20th century devised their own system of notation. This system, Celticist transcription, is also used for Gaelic in Scotland and the Isle of Man but not for any other languages, even other Celtic ones. There are some differences but really, in my opinion, this system is just а modified version of the IPA.

Celticist transcription isn't at all well known outside Gaelic language circles and varies from book to book so as far as I can tell, there are no online resources to specifically learn it. fuaimeanna.ie is a very useful website in general to learn the sounds of Irish and uses Celticist as well as IPA. It's a nice opportunity to learn and compare. Even though there are not many resources to learn Celticist, not to worry because it's usually explained at the start of Irish linguistic books and doesn't have as many different symbols as the IPA.

The important thing to know here is that the two systems of transcribing speech aren't really that different. Whereas they serve different purposes and are used separate from each other, they also employ a lot of the same techniques and knowing the workings of one system with some kind of a basic description of the other is enough in my opinion to facilitate easy use.

For the time being, I'm just going to use the Celticist transcription that I see in texts and try and make my own when I need to but if I think something is unclear or interesting I will provide my own audio interpretation. I don't trust that it will be perfect but I'll try to make it work.

The next post will probably be about verbs or pronouns.

Thanks for reading

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The above chart, created by Wikipedia user Mr KEBAB, is used under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

What is Ossory Irish and how does it relate to other dialects of the language?

As I mentioned in the introductory post, the dialect of Irish this blog will be focusing on is Ossory Irish. The Kingdom of Ossory existed roughly around the same area as the modern County Kilkenny and extended further north into parts of County Laois. It is in this area that the dialect was spoken but I have no reason to believe it did not also extend into parts of other counties. In this blog, I will be focusing mainly on Ossory Irish as it was spoken in County Kilkenny since it survived there longest and is documented better. Despite that, I will definitely make reference to the dialect from other areas too.

This map shows the dialects of the Gaelic

speaking world with Ossory (here Osraiġe)

in dark blue. Credit to @duilinn on

Twitter for the map.

Most of my main 'socio-linguistic' sources come from anecdotes and testimonies I've gathered from people primarily living in the townland of Borris Co. Carlow and surrounding areas of Ballytiglea, Skeoughvosteen, Cournellan (known as 'Clash'), et al. and experiences in surrounding towns like Bagenalstown, Goresbridge and Graiguenamanagh. These areas are dotted either side of the Kilkenny/Carlow border and so the county identity varies. People from Ballytiglea Co. Carlow consider themselves to be from Kilkenny because the nearest town is actually Goresbridge but people from the town of Borris itself will generally consider themselves to be from Carlow. You could say that whichever proper town the person's family is closest to and wherever their family graveyard is will be their county. Since traditionally these areas were also tied with Glenmore, the home of the last native speaker, I think it is perfectly suitable to include these areas within the range of Ossory Irish.

The Ossory dialect itself is an interesting one. You could class it under the branch of East Munster falling along one end of a spectrum which once stretched from parts of Clare eastwards. The dialect itself shares many features with the Irish found in Ring Co. Waterford, however, it is definitely distinct. It contains many features formerly found in parts of Tipperary, Clare and certainly elsewhere in Leinster with a good deal of its own unique qualities too.

The next few posts will talk about things like the phonemic transcription and then after that, I will start my overview of this dialect.

Introduction to Kilkenny Irish

The purpose of this blog is to document features of the Irish dialect of Kilkenny. Prior to the Great Famine of the 19th century, Irish (or Gaelic) was the dominant language of parts of Kilkenny and surrounding regions. We would today call this dialect 'Ossory Irish', based on the ancient Gaelic kingdom of the same name. Irish was used in these communities by some parts of the population (older/rural people) in this region until around the end of the 19th century and maybe a bit longer. Irish survived longer in Kilkenny than any other Ossory Irish speaking area and died finally with the presumed last native speaker, Pádraig de Paor. He is also known by his English name, Patrick Power.

I will be using this site to document resources I encounter including texts written in the dialect, information from oral history, notes about features and any audio I may get access to.

I will try my best to compare this dialect with specific examples from other parts of the country but my knowledge of linguistics and my scope of experience with Irish dialects is small and limited to mostly Connacht. I will, however, have the help of a number of people who are so kind as to always help me with the questions I have.