Another example by the same speaker: (twelfth) dó dhéag /Ê€/
It’s a little late but hey 😉
We have the pronunciation /daË reËg/ as a phonological variant in Scottish Gaelic too (for dà dheug as we spell it). It’s an exception around which you cannot (in ScG) base rules for pronouncing dh.
The other observation, reading the above, I’d like to offer is that the realization of slender dh/gh in ScG differs depending on the distribution. It only occurs as /Ê/ initiall but medially and finally, it’s reduced to /j/ e.g. dhiùlt /ÊuËLd/ but uidheam /ujÉ™m/. Perhaps that also plays a role in Irish.
And I totally agree that /ɣʲ/ is misleading – it’s just one of those conventions that have grown out of the scholarly tradition so it fits nicely in the paradigm.
