Weak Segments in Irish English (original) (raw)
Related papers
1996
Consonant weakening (lenition) is a feature of both Irish and Irish English which reaches back far in the histories of both languages. Its manifestation and its system status is quite different in both cases so that any simple transfer theory will fail to account for lenition in Irish English. The present paper will be primarily concerned with describing the phonological conditions for consonant weakening in Irish English and with putting it in the broader perspective of similar phenomena in other varieties of English and finally with addressing the question of its genesis within Irish English, above all in the south of the country. Attention with be paid to its distribution in urban and rural varieties of the Republic and to its extent in colloquial and less-received registers of Irish English.
Syllable onsets in Irish English
WORD
This study is intended to present a unified discussion of a number of phenomena which are different in Irish English (hereafter IrE) and Received Pronunciation (hereafter RP) as described in Gimson (1980:89ff.). It is also designed to show that these phenomena are in fact related to each other, not only due to their position in syllable nuclei but also on the level of phonological abstractness. The first phenomenon concerns the sequence which developed from Middle English /iu/ and /eu/. In both of these diphthongs the first element developed into a voiced palatal continuant losing its vocalic character, and yielding finally the sequence /ju:/ (Dobson 1968:705ff., Welna 1978:224). The frequency of this sound in French loan-words and the fact that Middle English /u:/ had been shifted first to /qu/ and later to /au/ as a result of the Great Vowel Shift seems to have led to /ju:/ standing as the pronunciation of the letter u and to be used as the English rendering of any later loan-words containing long /u:/. It also affected the pronunciation of the /u:/ sounds of loans established in Middle English, for example university with initial /u:/ (from Old French université, Onions 1966:961). The dating of the collapse of /eu/ and /iu/ can be given as mid 16th century, interpreting the orthoepic evidence of Bullokar who confirms in a rhyme that they were pronounced the same (Dobson 1968:802) and the merger was complete by the mid 17th century when it probably had developed from /iu/ to /ju:/. The importance of these considerations for the issue at hand is to establish that /ju:/ was the pronunciation of the Middle English diphthongs at the time of the most extensive Anglification of Ireland in the 17th and early 18th century (Bliss 1979: 19ff.). The remarks below refer to present-day IrE and to the variety of it which I term urban middle class. This general designation, while without validity for many areas of IrE phonology such as the realization of stressed vowels, can be permitted here because the peculiarities of IrE described below are found in all varieties of IrE with the sole exception of contact IrE (that of the 'Gaeltacht' or Irish-speaking areas) and of course of Ulster which is radically different from the English of the Republic of Ireland.
Voicing and devoicing in Irish English voiced plosives
This study investigates the extent of voicing in the voiced plosives /b, d/ across a range of phonetic contexts in Irish English. Spectrographic and waveform analysis showed that /b, d/ were almost always voiceless sentence-initially, substantially devoiced sentence-finally, and varied considerably sentence-medially. Further analysis of sentence-medial position found that if the plosive was part of a stressed syllable it was substantially less voiced than if it was part of an unstressed syllable. Focus also had an effect: less voicing was found in a nuclear syllable in narrow focus than in broad focus or a deaccented tail. Comparison of these findings with an analogous study [6] of two other varieties of English (Wisconsin and North Carolina) did not verify the hypothesis that Irish English has a greater tendency to devoice medial /b/. Instead, there was a large inter-speaker difference, with two speakers show devoicing of /b/ frequently and two speakers infrequently.
A phonetic comparison of two Irish English varieties
Proceedings of 11th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics, 2020
This research offers a preliminary survey on vowels and diphthong variation between two Irish English varieties: Galway (GW) and Letterkenny (LK). The results showed only a smaller difference between GW and LK with respect to the monophthongs, whereas a larger difference was found for the MOUTH diphthong. Despite the great amount of literature on English dialects, a phonetic investigation of these specific varieties is still lacking. This study may open the path to further investigations of sociophonetic values and the stereotypes associated with different varieties, in particular those of the northern regions.
Analysis of the vowel system of Wexford English
2019
This paper analyses the vowel system of Wexford English, focussing on qualitative and quantitative differences, as well as the influence of Wexford English in a rhotic environment. To answer this question, we measured vowel formants and durations from two corpora, one containing vowels in a non-rhotic environment, one in a rhotic one, and compared them, using plots and bar charts. Our results confirmed the literature provided, and revealed Wexford English peculiarities, as the absence of /ʌ/ and the diphthongization of /eː/ and /oː/. In a rhotic environment, long vowels present a retraction, while short ones are often reduced to schwa. In future, these results could be confirmed by a similar analysis in a bigger spoken corpus.
Accent boundaries and linguistic continua in the laryngeal subsystems of English
Linguistics Beyond and Within (LingBaW), 8, 24–36., 2022
A parallel is drawn between the northernmost regions of England represented by Durham and Yorkshire and the transition zone Ouddeken (2016) identifies between voicing and aspiration languages in the Dutch-German dialect continuum. It is argued that, owing to historical changes and dialect contact, the Northern Englishes discussed exhibit hybrid laryngeal systems as a result of being geographically intermediate between Scots in Scotland, which is a voice language similar to Dutch, and mainstream varieties of English spoken more to the south in England (and in most of the rest of the English-speaking world), which are aspiration systems of the German type. We model the emergence of laryngeal systems as the setting of three parameters: (i) whether the laryngeally marked/specified obstruent series contains [voice] (L-system) or [asp] (H-system); (ii) whether the laryngeal prime is able to spread (right-to-left); and (iii) whether the system has pre-obstruent delaryngealisation (POD) (due to which in C1C2, C1 becomes unmarked/underspecified). While spreading L with POD derives voice languages and non-spreading H with no POD derives aspiration languages, two mixed combinations derive the intermediate categories of Durham and Yorkshire (spreading L & no POD and spreading H & no POD, respectively). We also show that all remaining combinations are attested cross-linguistically or else theoretically uninterpretable.
9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018, 2018
This paper explores the influence of IP (i.e. Intonational Phrase) length on the scaling of the IP-initial and IP-final tonal targetspeaks (and valleys) in three Irish dialects. The analysis covers a set of matched neutral (i.e. broad focus) declaratives of two IP lengths (with 2 and 3 accent groups, respectively) produced by native speakers of two Connaught dialects, C-CF and C-IM and the Ulster dialect of U-GD. The data was analysed for H and L tone scaling in the phraseinitial and final accents. Additionally, the ratio of the final to the initial peak height was calculated (and the final to initial L height in the case of the U-GD dialect). The results show little to no influence of IP length in the Connaught dialects on any of the peak metrics. However, for the U-GD dialect there is a strong influence of IP length on the initial accent (L*+H) where both the L* and H elements are substantially raised. The final accent behaves rather differently being remarkably invariant in both IP length conditions.