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
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| 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.
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