Nov. 7th, 2011 01:25 pm
There once was a monk from Iona
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monshu working from home on Fridays (kind of a test run for what he'd like to be doing in retirement). It helps that I'm finally accepting the fact that this means he really is WORKING, only at home. It's not like when he does some work on the weekends. On Fridays, he may or may not get a nap in, and you can't count on him having any more time to put into preparing dinner than he would on any ordinary workday. This past Friday, in fact, he was pushing a deadline, so we ended up just going out for Thai.
Most of the stuff he does bores me silly (and him, too, half the time--at least to go by his kvetches) but occasionally there's a gem. He said something offhand about doing a book on "Scottish saints" so I had to take a look for myself. The chief subject of it was Adomnán of Iona, who despite the sobriquet was probably a native of West Donegal. Naturally, this is the Old Irish form of his name, so lenition of the medial consonants is not show; the modern form is Adhamhnán.
Looking at that, I was stumped how to pronounce it. In general, the rules are fairly straightforward. But here two of them conflict: adh(a) usually represents /ai/, but amh(a) is /au/ (historically /ãũ/, contrasting with abh(a), which wasn't nasalised). It can't be both; Irish doesn't allow contiguous long vowels or diphthongs within a morpheme. I figured one would win out over the other, but which?
Neither.
I forgot that there's an alternative pronunciation of adha found predominately (if not solely) in names. Donnchadha, for instance, is pronounced with final /uː/, not final /ai/. (Thus the anglicised version "Donahue".) This /uː/ swallows up what comes after it so what you end up with is /uːnaːn/. I would give this final stress in the Munster fashion, but as he's a Donegal man, perhaps it would be more fitting to apply Ulster rules and say ['uːn̪ˠan̪ˠ] instead.
I guess this should've been obvious from the common anglicisation of his name, i.e. "Eunan". But these can be so idiosyncratic that I never know how far to trust them. I mean, why eu? Any English-speaker is going to look at that and immediately think /juː/ Why not "Oona" to match Úna? I can't help suspecting some sort of Scottish plot.
monshu working from home on Fridays (kind of a test run for what he'd like to be doing in retirement). It helps that I'm finally accepting the fact that this means he really is WORKING, only at home. It's not like when he does some work on the weekends. On Fridays, he may or may not get a nap in, and you can't count on him having any more time to put into preparing dinner than he would on any ordinary workday. This past Friday, in fact, he was pushing a deadline, so we ended up just going out for Thai.Most of the stuff he does bores me silly (and him, too, half the time--at least to go by his kvetches) but occasionally there's a gem. He said something offhand about doing a book on "Scottish saints" so I had to take a look for myself. The chief subject of it was Adomnán of Iona, who despite the sobriquet was probably a native of West Donegal. Naturally, this is the Old Irish form of his name, so lenition of the medial consonants is not show; the modern form is Adhamhnán.
Looking at that, I was stumped how to pronounce it. In general, the rules are fairly straightforward. But here two of them conflict: adh(a) usually represents /ai/, but amh(a) is /au/ (historically /ãũ/, contrasting with abh(a), which wasn't nasalised). It can't be both; Irish doesn't allow contiguous long vowels or diphthongs within a morpheme. I figured one would win out over the other, but which?
Neither.
I forgot that there's an alternative pronunciation of adha found predominately (if not solely) in names. Donnchadha, for instance, is pronounced with final /uː/, not final /ai/. (Thus the anglicised version "Donahue".) This /uː/ swallows up what comes after it so what you end up with is /uːnaːn/. I would give this final stress in the Munster fashion, but as he's a Donegal man, perhaps it would be more fitting to apply Ulster rules and say ['uːn̪ˠan̪ˠ] instead.
I guess this should've been obvious from the common anglicisation of his name, i.e. "Eunan". But these can be so idiosyncratic that I never know how far to trust them. I mean, why eu? Any English-speaker is going to look at that and immediately think /juː/ Why not "Oona" to match Úna? I can't help suspecting some sort of Scottish plot.