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The author should have asked the speakers to translate words from English, in this way they wouldn’t have said something that doesn’t exist in their dialect… That’s what I do in my fieldwork on Breton actually.
The author should have asked the speakers to translate words from English, in this way they wouldn’t have said something that doesn’t exist in their dialect… That’s what I do in my fieldwork on Breton actually.
Have you read the [url=http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/174016]book[/url] on Irish dialects by Hickey? I find it very good and detailed, and with loads of audio collected in all Gaeltacht areas. What they did for this book is to combine both. They had a list of Irish sentences they asked speakers to read, but they also had a list of English sentences they asked speakers to translate into Irish. It makes for a good combination.
Yeah I have a copy of it (but not read much of it yet) and the cd.
They had a list of Irish sentences they asked speakers to read,
Yeah I don’t see what’s the aim of that, people say things that don’t exist in their dialect, even grammatical forms…
Yeah I have a copy of it (but not read much of it yet) and the cd.
They had a list of Irish sentences they asked speakers to read,
Yeah I don’t see what’s the aim of that, people say things that don’t exist in their dialect, even grammatical forms…
Apparently, they used that to test for differences in pronunciation and then used the list with English sentences to also look at lexical and grammatical differences. As I’m sure you’ve seen, they did adjust the lists of Irish sentences for the different “main” dialects.
All in all I think it’s quite valuable, though I disagree a bit with the proportions. Too few speakers translating from English and too many speakers reading from Irish. Had the proportions been turned around, it would have been ideal. Still, they do have several speakers translating from English for each Gaeltacht area except Ráth Chairn and the Aran Islands. I would say it’s the best book yet on Irish dialects.
For those who don’t have the book, here are the 56 English sentences they asked Irish speakers to translate http://www.uni-due.de/DI/translation.html
Speakers from different villages in Corca Dhuibhne, Uíbh Ráthach, Múscraí, Oiléan Chléire, An Rinn, Cois Fharraige, Conamara Theas, Joyce County, Southern Mayo, Acaill, Ceathrú Thaidhg, Southern Donegal and Northern Donegal say those 56 English sentences in Irish. While of course nowhere as detailed as LASID, it still provides for a quite good overview of Irish dialects at the start of the 21st century.
Though it’s a bit weird, it would make more sense to only include words that really exist. By the way, I already noticed the same thing for the Corca Dhuibhne speaker. He pronounces every word with a Munster pronunciation, but some of the words would be different in Corca Dhuibhne.
Interestingly, there are also counter-examples to that, for instance, the word ‘radhairc’ is read by the Connemara speaker as /​ˈ​a​.​f​ə​rʹ​kʹ/ (“amhairc”).
I suppose the main emphasis of “Fuaimeanna na Gaeilge” is on the Irish sound-system in general, rather than dialectology, and the website provides an excellent tool for learning correct pronunciation, even if the words used don’t always exist in a given dialect. 🙂
Still, I would agree that the number of transcription errors is disconcerting and thwarts the purpose of the whole book, which seems to be to teach phonetics to students of Irish.
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