download as
printer friendly pdf

Compensatory Lengthening and the Secret of Time

No, I'm not about to go mystic on you, no worries.  But time does come into it.  Now - just humour me for a moment and enjoy:

V > V:; VV /_ C: [+son]#
V > V:; VV /_ C: [+son][αplace]C[αplace]

V > V / _ C:[+son]V
V > V / _ C:[+son][αplace]C[βplace] and α ≠ β

You know, when I started doing linguistics ... quite some time ago, I thought I'd finally escape maths.  Hah!  Anyway, that was just for enjoyment, I will make things much clearer.

I'm sure you have all come across words like ann, ball, ceann and cam and wondered where the strange diphthongs come from?  Why do we say [aun̴̪] and [kaum] and [b̊auɫ̪]?  Ok, we can take the view that they simply are pronounced like that and that we have to learn by listening.  Fair enough, listening is important, but some of us are a bit more inquisitive than that and we don't all have the privilege of living with a native speaker.  And as it turns out, there are a few very good pointers - less arcane than the above rules by the way.

So here's what really happened:

Going back to Old Irish (again), we find a handful of interesting consonants.  Long sonorants - that is, L N R and M.  They are called sonorants because you can "keep saying them", almost as if they were vowels, something that doesn't work with p t k for example.  Because they are long, our kind scribes wrote them as double consonants, quite logical really.  So we get

So what?  Well, what happens is that the long consonants "transfer" their long quality to the preceding vowel.  This in turn gets diphthongised in many cases (as happens in many languages, just think of the changes from Old English to Modern English: hlūd [luːd] became loud [laʊd], nama [naːmə] became name [neɪm]) so what we have in terms of pronunciation is:

But hang on, if that happens before ll, nn and rr in Gaelic, what about ìm and cùm and innte and especially ceannaich, seeing ceann has a diphthong?  Well spotted.  As always, things aren't as straightforward as that.

First of all, when do you lengthen?

• Before rr: bàrr, geàrr, ceàrr, còrr, tàrr ...
  

• After i/ì: ìm, tìm, ...
  

• After u, io: cùm, lom, tom, a chum, ionnsaich, ionnan, cionn ...

Second, when do you diphthongise?

• Everywhere else
  

• Including after "disappeared" fricatives.  In other terms, if you come across a bh, dh, gh or mh that is apparently not pronounced, this fricatives has gone into lengthening or diphthongising the preceding vowel.  Cool, eh?  snaidhm, geamhradh, oighre ...

And when not to?

• If the sonorant is followed by another vowel.  This includes words with helping vowels, so words like Donnchadh escape both lengthening and diphthongisation.  A good pair of words to remeber here is caill [kaiʎ] and cailleach [kaʎax]; similarly ann [aun̴̪] and Anna [an̴̪ə]
  

• When the vowel before the sonorant is a diphthong anyway,  e.g. iarr
  

• Traditioanlly there was a tendency not to diphthongise when the sonorant is followed by a homo-organic consonant, meaning that if ll, nn, rr are followed by d, dh, s, t, or th you would simply lengthen the vowel.  This is still apparent in words like sùnndach which can still be heard as [suːn̴̪d̪̊ax] but this rule is only marginal today.

Before we answer the question of "how to", let's just take a quick look at "where to".  There's a broad divide into "progressive" or dipthongising and "conservative" or lengthening dialects. 

As you can see, it's not much of an issue anymore, as most of the conservative (regarding lengthening) dialects of East Perthshire, Kintyre and Arran are mostly moribund today.  So to be brief, all that needs to be said about these dialects is that in almost all cases these dialects either lenghten the vowel or simply have a short vowel, but hardly ever dipthongise. So in Arran Gaelic for example ann, ceann, donn, cùm and ionnsaich would be pronounced as: [an̴̪] [kʲan̴̪] [d̪̊on̴̪] [kum] and [in̴̪siç].

The most lively dialects today are fairly homogenous, except perhaps for Lewis Gaelic (don't sigh) which is the most progressive amongst these.  There are two categories of diphthongs to be considered here: the so called i-glides and the u-glides.  The difference in quality is simply due to the quality of the original vowel and following consonant (either braod or slender) and isn't much of a problem.  Here's an overview over these dialects:

So how does this all relate to the Secret of Time?  What's Gaelic for time?  Àm, isn't it?  Or is it am?  Cùm or cum?  Ceàrr or cearr?  Strictly speaking, as long as you are aware of the rules of lengthening/diphthongisation (which is easy if you're a native speaker) there is no need really to indicate length over the vowels.  But people like to clarify, so at some point they began to indicate the long vowel/diphthong by using an accent over it.  But as this hasn't become universal yet, you find people spelling words like ceàrr, bàrr, àm, cam etc with or without an accent.  It's up to you in a way, but as the general practice these days seems to be to use the accent, we suggest you do that.  But that's the secret behind this confusion over words like àm vs am anyway.

As an extra minor footnote watch out for the derivatives of these words.  As many will add a vowel to indicate the genitive or add an ending to form a verbal noun, you must not pronounce or write a long vowel/diphthong in the derived word.  Here's a few illustrative examples:

So.  Happy diphthongising to you all.