An Domhnach díomhaoin

[muckefuck]

D'éiríos go luath maidin Dé Domhnaigh. Do bhuaileas le mo stócach, mo dheartháir agus a bhean sa Chaife Meinl agus d'ólamair lán caife. D'ólas an iomarca mar is gnách. Bhí air monshu dul abhaile, ach leis an mbeirt eile acu go dtí a dtigh chun an foirgneamh nua a fheiceáil. Tá sé an-álainn. D'fhanas in éineacht leo ar feadh tamaill agus do bhíomair ag caint. Do chabhraíos leo na brioscaí a phúdráil le siúcra.

[buíochas le fainic_thu_fein as na ceartúcháin]

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

d'ólamair, do bhíomair, air monshu

These are all dialect pronunciations. Dillon and Ó Cróinín consistently use the -air spelling with preterite plurals; they differentiate ar from air, but give the pronunciation [erʲ] for both.

d'ólamar a lán caifé

Wouldn't this be "we drank a lot of coffee"? I was trying to say "the lot of us drank coffee" (i.e. "we all drank coffee").

[fainic-thu-fein.livejournal.com]

d'ólamair, do bhíomair, air

If you want to pronounce them that way, it's fine, but I definitely wouldn't write them as such. As you said, it's difficult to juggle standard spellings with dialect pronunciations, but after a while and quite a bit of reading you get a feeling for what's acceptable. For most types of correspondence you'd be writing in Standard Irish (An Caighdeán Oifigiúil) anyway and pronouncing it in your head however you would normally, but even when making a concerted effort to write in dialect, whether your purpose is literary or maybe giving information to a speaker of that dialect specifically, there are still certain spellings that aren't accepted. For instance, I pronounce éigin as eicínt, a variant spelling I wouldn't think twice about using when writing an informal email to a fellow speaker of Connemara Irish, however I also say acub for acu (all third person plural prep. pronouns, actually, get a -b attached in my dialect), which is a spelling that isn't accepted even in Connemara-specific literature. (Btw, I don't remember hearing a slender R in these instances and most of the people around me are native speakers of Munster Irish. I'll have to listen more carefully)

Yes, d'ólama(i)r a lán caifé is "we drank a lot of coffee". I thought that's what you were going for. "We all drank coffee" is d'ólamar uile/uilig/go léir caifé.