Talk:caoineadh

Pronunciation

It's true that ao is usually /eː/ in Munster, but aoi is actually usually /iː/ (except in cases like saoil, which was originally saoghail). In this word, /iː/ is confirmed by Breatnach's Irish of Ring, Co. Waterford.

For Ulster, see s:A Dialect of Donegal/The Vowel System#124. There was a time when ao(i) was /ɯː/ in Ulster, but Quiggin reports that "the younger people" (as of over 110 years ago!) were already replacing it with /iː/. See also Ní Chasaide (1999) at w:Irish phonology#References, who does not list /ɯː/ as a phoneme of Donegal Irish. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:49, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

I speak Donegal Irish. You can also easily hear it in Irish learning materials. And I cited a 2011 scholarly work which includes audio files. In addition, in Ring, aoi and ao become the diphthong /ai/... so that's a spectacularly bad example. Ogress (talk) 21:02, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Ailbhe Ní Chasaide speaks Donegal Irish too, and her scholarly work excludes /ɯː/ as a separate phoneme. I can believe that /iː/ after a broad consonant is retracted enough that it could almost be [ɯː], but unless there are minimal pairs, it's not a phoneme. There are audio files at http://www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/caoineadh; the one for Ulster sounds like [ˈkɯ̯iːnʲu] to me, i.e. starting as a high back vowel and then moving to a high front vowel. I wish I could see The Dialects of Irish, but de Gruyter's price is astronomical and out of my reach, and I have no access to a university library. As for Ring, Breatnach transcribes this very word as /kiːnʲə/ on page 6. The sound file for Munster at teanglann.ie also has /iː/, though I don't know what part of Munster that speaker comes from. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:19, 10 March 2017 (UTC)