Jan. 22nd, 2008 05:42 pm
Litriú a chosaint: Cuid a Dó
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muckefuckIn Part 1, I covered the issues of supradialectality (i.e. having a spelling system that works, with some adjustments, for all major dialects rather than one that works perfectly for one and badly for all others) and lexemic transparency (i.e. being able to easily recognise different word forms as belonging to the same lexeme despite seemingly irregular phonetic divergences). But most people's issues with Irish spelling is more fundamental than that. To wit: What's with all the extra vowels?
The fundamental poverty of vowel symbols in the Latin alphabet--only five, even though that's the absolute minimum number of distinctive vowels in most of the languages that use it--has been a challenge for a wide range of orthographies just within Europe. The Latins simply ignored vowel length distinctions in their writings, whereas other European languages have adopted various kludges: macrons (e.g. Latvian), acute accents (Czech, Hungarian), additional mute vowel symbols (English, Flemish), additional mute consonant symbols (German), doubled vowels (Finnish), doubled consonants after short vowels (various Germanic languages), and so forth. The Irish also adopted acute accents, but this only solved half their problem.
You see, in addition to its 10+ vowels (depending on dialect and analysis--and not including diphthongs), Irish also has at least 33 distinctive consonant phonemes. (Some dialects distinguish as few as six sonorants, others up to ten.) The alphabet brought to them by the Romans, however, had only 19 consonant symbols (including ones of marginal use like K, Q, and X). So what were they to do? One possible solution would've been to create entirely new symbols for distinctions lacking in Latin, as Slavic-speakers did with the Greek characters they had to work with. But, for whatever reason, early adapters of the Latin script seem to have been loath to do this. Another option was to introduce diacritics, but in the end they only created one (and for a special purpose which will be explained later).
Instead, the Irish chose the innovative solution of using the nature of the surrounding vowels to signal the quality of the consonants. As I pointed out before, this is essentially the solution adopted by the designers of Cyrillic, the crucial differences being that (a) they had fewer distinctive vowels to represent (only ten in modern Russian, for instance) and (b) slightly more symbols to start with (seven Greek vowels vs. the five of Latin). So it only took a slight expansion in the number of vowels characters to represent all the distinctions they needed. Thus the Irish end up with more than forty difference vowel digraphs and trigraphs--and that's before you add in new diphthongs which arose form the vocalisation of certain consonants (particularly /v/, /ɣ/, and /j/). Each distinctive vowel needs four forms: One for use between two slender consonants, one between two broad consonants, one between a slender and a broad, and one between a broad and a slender.
Now, some critics have argued that this is excessive: Why mark each medial consonant twice? But, again, I think we see some pattern-preserving logic at work. Consider the Germanic consonant-doubling feature mentioned in passing above. Either consonants are always doubled after short vowels (as in German), in which case you have "superfluous" word consonants that become necessary only when an ending is added (e.g. Bett, pl. Betten) or consonants are doubled only medially, in which case you have spelling alternations in the stems of words which take endings (e.g. bed, pl. bedden). Neither approach is clearly superior, as attested to by the fact that the spelling systems of closely-related languages have arbitrarily diverged over this point.
As with other spellings conventions, the Irish have opted for paradigmatic transparency in this instance. Rather than have alternations like béal "mouth", pl. béla, Modern Irish keeps the stem béal throughout and the pluralisation rule becomes a simple matter of adding -a. This is also evident in their treatment of the initial mutations for which Celtic languages are so famed. Whereas Welsh spelling simply replaces the initial consonant (e.g. ceg "mouth", 'ngheg i "my mouth", ei cheg "her mouth", ei geg "his mouth", etc.), Irish maintains it and prefixes the new value, i.e. a béal "her mouth", a bhéal "his mouth", a mbéala "their mouths". As these mutations seem to cause much consternation among Welsh learners in their dictionary searches, clearly this isn't a useless practice. (I often hear complaints about the surfeit of h's in Irish, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is a rather young convention. In the traditional alphabet, in widespread use until WWII, lenition was actually shown by means of a small dot above the letter, i.e. a ḃeal. The newer script may make up in salience what it loses in concision, but it's worth mentioning that I still use the older convention in writing when I go back and find that I have left out a necessary mutation.)
Finally, although phonemicity rather than phoneticity is usually considered the ideal for orthographies, it should be pointed out that these "extra" vowels generally have phonetic coefficients and that this is an advantage for a system used by so many non-speakers, who haven't internalised the phonological rules needed to convert the underlying phonemes into their actual pronunciations. Broad consonants tend to have a fleeting velar glide (generally written [ˠ] in IPA, although superscript [ɰ] could also be argued for) and slender consonants a slight palatal one, both of which become more pronounced before long vowels of the opposed (i.e. front or back, respectively) quality. The first is also rounded after labials, so a word like buí "yellow" actually comes quite close to being pronounced [bʷi:]. (A naïve English speaker might write this "bwee".) By the same token, beo "alive" is often rendered [bjo:].
In addition, there's often a slight anticipatory off-glide after high vowels so even the maligned "flanking" vowels have a purpose. That is, a word like buíon "class" comes close to being pronounced [bʷi:ə̯nˠ]--as you can see, almost a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and phone. In Munster dialect, /e:/ even diphthongises before broad consonants, so béal is pronounced [bji:alˠ] (in contrast to the pan-Irish /iə/ diphthong found in words like bialann [bji:əlˠən] "canteen"). So learn your spelling well and you'll seldom be in doubt as to how a word should sound. Any English-speaker should be thankful for that!
The fundamental poverty of vowel symbols in the Latin alphabet--only five, even though that's the absolute minimum number of distinctive vowels in most of the languages that use it--has been a challenge for a wide range of orthographies just within Europe. The Latins simply ignored vowel length distinctions in their writings, whereas other European languages have adopted various kludges: macrons (e.g. Latvian), acute accents (Czech, Hungarian), additional mute vowel symbols (English, Flemish), additional mute consonant symbols (German), doubled vowels (Finnish), doubled consonants after short vowels (various Germanic languages), and so forth. The Irish also adopted acute accents, but this only solved half their problem.
You see, in addition to its 10+ vowels (depending on dialect and analysis--and not including diphthongs), Irish also has at least 33 distinctive consonant phonemes. (Some dialects distinguish as few as six sonorants, others up to ten.) The alphabet brought to them by the Romans, however, had only 19 consonant symbols (including ones of marginal use like K, Q, and X). So what were they to do? One possible solution would've been to create entirely new symbols for distinctions lacking in Latin, as Slavic-speakers did with the Greek characters they had to work with. But, for whatever reason, early adapters of the Latin script seem to have been loath to do this. Another option was to introduce diacritics, but in the end they only created one (and for a special purpose which will be explained later).
Instead, the Irish chose the innovative solution of using the nature of the surrounding vowels to signal the quality of the consonants. As I pointed out before, this is essentially the solution adopted by the designers of Cyrillic, the crucial differences being that (a) they had fewer distinctive vowels to represent (only ten in modern Russian, for instance) and (b) slightly more symbols to start with (seven Greek vowels vs. the five of Latin). So it only took a slight expansion in the number of vowels characters to represent all the distinctions they needed. Thus the Irish end up with more than forty difference vowel digraphs and trigraphs--and that's before you add in new diphthongs which arose form the vocalisation of certain consonants (particularly /v/, /ɣ/, and /j/). Each distinctive vowel needs four forms: One for use between two slender consonants, one between two broad consonants, one between a slender and a broad, and one between a broad and a slender.
Now, some critics have argued that this is excessive: Why mark each medial consonant twice? But, again, I think we see some pattern-preserving logic at work. Consider the Germanic consonant-doubling feature mentioned in passing above. Either consonants are always doubled after short vowels (as in German), in which case you have "superfluous" word consonants that become necessary only when an ending is added (e.g. Bett, pl. Betten) or consonants are doubled only medially, in which case you have spelling alternations in the stems of words which take endings (e.g. bed, pl. bedden). Neither approach is clearly superior, as attested to by the fact that the spelling systems of closely-related languages have arbitrarily diverged over this point.
As with other spellings conventions, the Irish have opted for paradigmatic transparency in this instance. Rather than have alternations like béal "mouth", pl. béla, Modern Irish keeps the stem béal throughout and the pluralisation rule becomes a simple matter of adding -a. This is also evident in their treatment of the initial mutations for which Celtic languages are so famed. Whereas Welsh spelling simply replaces the initial consonant (e.g. ceg "mouth", 'ngheg i "my mouth", ei cheg "her mouth", ei geg "his mouth", etc.), Irish maintains it and prefixes the new value, i.e. a béal "her mouth", a bhéal "his mouth", a mbéala "their mouths". As these mutations seem to cause much consternation among Welsh learners in their dictionary searches, clearly this isn't a useless practice. (I often hear complaints about the surfeit of h's in Irish, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is a rather young convention. In the traditional alphabet, in widespread use until WWII, lenition was actually shown by means of a small dot above the letter, i.e. a ḃeal. The newer script may make up in salience what it loses in concision, but it's worth mentioning that I still use the older convention in writing when I go back and find that I have left out a necessary mutation.)
Finally, although phonemicity rather than phoneticity is usually considered the ideal for orthographies, it should be pointed out that these "extra" vowels generally have phonetic coefficients and that this is an advantage for a system used by so many non-speakers, who haven't internalised the phonological rules needed to convert the underlying phonemes into their actual pronunciations. Broad consonants tend to have a fleeting velar glide (generally written [ˠ] in IPA, although superscript [ɰ] could also be argued for) and slender consonants a slight palatal one, both of which become more pronounced before long vowels of the opposed (i.e. front or back, respectively) quality. The first is also rounded after labials, so a word like buí "yellow" actually comes quite close to being pronounced [bʷi:]. (A naïve English speaker might write this "bwee".) By the same token, beo "alive" is often rendered [bjo:].
In addition, there's often a slight anticipatory off-glide after high vowels so even the maligned "flanking" vowels have a purpose. That is, a word like buíon "class" comes close to being pronounced [bʷi:ə̯nˠ]--as you can see, almost a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and phone. In Munster dialect, /e:/ even diphthongises before broad consonants, so béal is pronounced [bji:alˠ] (in contrast to the pan-Irish /iə/ diphthong found in words like bialann [bji:əlˠən] "canteen"). So learn your spelling well and you'll seldom be in doubt as to how a word should sound. Any English-speaker should be thankful for that!
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Do you have any idea how well Rumantsch Grischun measures up in this respect?
I seem to recall reading that some of their spellings are compromises intended to reflect the different pronunciations in the various dialects (of which I think there were four literary standards, though five or so main dialects with additional subdialects), but don't know much in the way of details.
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