Table of Contents
What is Lenition in Irish?
An important and frequent feature in Irish grammar is the concept of lenition. Basically, when an initial consonant is lenited (or softened) it changes the way that consonant is sounded and how the beginning of the word is spelt. You lenite or soften the sound of a consonant in Irish by normally placing a ‘h’ after it.
Why is Scottish Gaelic spelling so strange?
The orthographic complexities of the Goidelic/Gaelic languages stems from its quite complex phonology, which is very difficult to represent using the Latin alphabet. This is why Irish and Scottish Gaelic spellings for example seem so strange.
How many phonemes are there in Gaelic?
Gaelic phonology is characterised by: a phoneme inventory particularly rich in sonorant coronal phonemes (commonly nine in total) a contrasting set of palatalised and non-palatalised consonants. strong initial word-stress and vowel reduction in unstressed syllables.
Is Gaelic a phonetic language?
Irish Gaelic just uses letters and combinations of letters differently to represent spoken sounds, in relation to English, for example. Update: Some of our online Irish lessons now do feature phonetic spelling of Irish Gaelic words! It’s written beside each “play” button, where available.
Why does lenition occur?
The cause of lenition was generally in Early Irish the position of the consonant between two vowels, as well as within the word as over the word “limits.” If the word ended in a vowel and the next began in a consonant + vowel (which was mostly the case), this consonant was now between 2 vowels and was lenited.
What is the purpose of lenition?
Lenition is an initial consonant mutation which “weakens” (cf. Latin lenis ‘weak’) the sound of the consonant at the beginning of a word. It is used to mark certain morphological contrasts and to mark inflection.
Is Scottish Gaelic phonetic?
The (Scottish) Gaelic name for (Scottish) Gaelic is Gàidhlig, pronounced ‘gaa-lik’, not to be confused with the Irish (Gaelic) name for Irish (Gaelic), which is written Gaeilge and pronounced ‘gail-gyuh’….Test.
| Name | Pronunciation |
|---|---|
| Sgurr an Doire Leathain | ‘skuur uhn dorruh ly-e-hin’ |
Why are the Irish so weird?
The reason why Irish spelling looks weird at first is that it makes slender and broad consonants explicit. Instead of using a different character for broad and slender, Irish uses vowels (and sometimes extra consonants) to indicate if a consonant is slender or broad.