B' àill leibh? or Fast Speech

While we won't get into the argument about how to write Gàidhlig and which sounds to write and which not to, we will try instead to give you a feel for what happens when "sounds collide" in Gaelic.

A General Point - well, two actually.  One rule that applies to many other languages applies here to: unstressed vowels live dangerously.  The second is 'two of the same kind are not good news'.

1) The Schwa [ə]
This little fellow leads a very dangerous life in most languages.  Generally you get schwa's when a 'normal' vowel does not receive stress and over time fades away.  It can go like this:

The Goidelic languages (Irish, Gaelic and Manx) are particularly fond of this.  But to get back to the topic.

Gaelic has a lot of schwa's, especially in non-initial syllables of words (but that's a different story) but also in many many little function words.  Function words are little bits of word that have more of a purpose than hard meaning.  Some English function words are with, a, her, this, on, no and so on.  They tell you about some relationship between words or sentences, things in the world.  The negation <no> for example just tells you that the statement being made is in the negative, it's nothing that you can draw or point at.

For whatever reason, function words rarely receive a lot of prominence in speech in any language.  Sometimes they may receive stress when you're trying to emphasise the particular function word e.g. 'I did NOT kill her'.  Normally it leads a shadowy existence - 'I didn't kill her!' being a nice example.

This applies to Gaelic too. Unfortunately you can't always tell from the spelling which vowels are schwa's and which aren't because the letter a has to stand in for the [a] sound and the schwa.  But not to despair.  One good starting point is to say that all function particles in Gaelic bar one which are spelt <a> are schwa's:

Not an exhaustive list, but all I can think of just now.  And before you ask, yes, strictly speaking ar and ur are pronounced exactly the same way.  It's not quite as mad as it sounds - Manx has just the one word nyn [nən] meaning 'our', 'your' and 'their'; context generally supplies enough information to tell you what someone is talking about.  Sometimes people pronounce ar as [aɾ] in Gaelic for clarity though.

The exception mentioned earlier (as far as the function words go) is the preposition á, which is pronounced with a clear vowel: [a].  Which, incidentally, is why there is an acute accent on it.

But back to fast speech now.  Generally we can say that in fast speech schwa's drop out as long as the meaning of the resulting statement is still clear.  Let's look at an example:

Tha a h-athair a' dol a dh'iarraidh an cù as lugha

Which in careful speech you would pronounce as:

 [ha ə hahɛɾʲ ə d̪̊ɔɫ̪ ə ʝiər̴ɪ ən kuː əs ɫ̪ɤɣə]

But normally people don't use careful speech - we talk much faster than that and things start running into each other and some drop out.  Which of course happens in Gaelic to, so in normal speech one would pronounce tha above as:

[ha hahɛɾʲ d̪̊ɔɫ̪ə ʝiər̴ɪ ŋkuː sɫ̪ɤɣ]

What has happened?  Let's look at it step by step:

1. The first a has dropped out because the [h] shows anyway that we are talking about 'her father' because his father would simply be [ahɛɾʲ] so to save breath, you lose the schwa.

2. The a' we can afford to lose because dol is always a verbal noun so there can be no confusion about it's meaning.

3. The next [ə] in front of dh'iarraidh we keep because it keeps two consonats (l and dh') from coming together (which would be more effort to pronounce) but it gets fused to dol so it flows better.

4. The an drops the schwa and the [n] assimilates into a [ŋ] (to become more like the next sound, see the section on nasalisation).  It can do that because we still know it's 'the dog' we're talking about because no other combination would yield [ŋkuː].

5. The next schwa we drop for basically the same reason - the only [s] that makes sense in front of lugha is that of the comparative particle.

6. And because we are coming to the end of our statement and are running out of breath, we lose the final schwa because losing it doesn't affect the meaning either.

And this happens all over the place.  Most learners start out by pronouncing all words that are written down anyway, which is okay as long as you remember to pronounce the words in the above list as schwa's, not clear [a] vowels.  The important next step is that once you get more comfortable speaking the language and speeding up a bit, you start dropping sounds in the same way as natie speakers do.  Listening helps you a lot here, but it helps to know what to look out for in the first place.

2) Two of the same ain't good
Again this is one of those things that happen in all languages when you speak at normal speed.  In a nutshell it means that when you get two vowels (from two different words) clashing together, generally one of them loses out.  Especially if the two vowels are the same.

When two [a] vowels for example bump into each other, one of them gets deleted:

__a + a__ > __a__

Let's look at some real life examples: 

The schwa in bu drops out so regularly before vowels we don't even write it anymore:

Same goes for noun + adjective, but to a slightly lesser extent (see below why):

You have to be careful here things don't get ambiguous.  In balla àrd, the schwa can be safely dropped because the resulting word can only mean 'wall'.  It can no be ball àrd 'a high member' because we would have a diphthong [au].  Similarly, duin' òg can only mean one thing.

But say you were talking about a dun cow - bó odhar.  Two of the same ain't good, no?  True, but not to the extent of messing up meaning.  If you dropped one of the vowels, the result would be [b̊o.əɾ] but unfortunately that means 'deaf' (bodhar).  So be careful you don't get too ambiguous.

It's a little bit more complicated with the personal pronouns because there is a possibility for confusion here.  Consider the following two examples:

Here we have three vowels coming together [a] [e] ([i] in the second example) and [ə].  If we simply dropped all the vowels or reduced them to a schwa, we couldn't tell anymore whether the sentence is supposed to refer to a he or a she.  So in the first instance, we collapse all vowels into [a] but in the second sentence, we retain the [i].  Why this way round?  After all, we could drop [i] and retain [e]. Probably because [e] is closer in pronunciation to [a] and therefore easier to assimilate, [i] being much further away.

3) Prepositions
Are you ready for this?  No, it basically works on the same principles, although the outcomes can be a bit confusing at times.  The tricky ones are essentially prepositions ending in a vowel in combination with a 'his', a 'her', ar 'our', ur 'your' and an 'their'.

This varies slightly between the dialects, but essentially what happens is the following:

The beauty of all of this is that in most cases, it doesn't get ambigous because you have lenition to guide you - r'a mhàthair can only mean to his mother because 'to her mother' would be r'a màthair.  Of course there are elements of ambiguity, but every language has those and generally context will supply the necessary information.  Few things we say are said in utter isolation, a statement like agus chunnaic e sin fo achlais (which on its own could either mean 'saw it under an armpit' or 'under his armpit') will generally be preceded by a chat about something going on, for example someone hiding something.

If you want to be clear in writing (which is advisable, especially in official texts when we don't want to be ambiguous) you can either write the silent vowel or if that looks to weird to you, add the apostrophe where a sound has dropped out: fo achlais 'under an armpit' - fo 'achlais 'under his armpit'.

Two prepositions need further explanations, do and de.  In colloquial speech these can change shape quite a lot.  Here's an overview over what can happen:

To begin with, most living dialects of Gaelic have consigned don and den to higher functions (extremely formal speech) and only have dhan and dhen.  Do and de without the fused definite article are somewhat more common.

However, dha is a very popular form in Lewis because for whatever reason it does no cause lenition - dha màthair 'to a mother', dha bó 'to a cow' etc.  And for many speakers in colloquial speech even that is too much work and both do and de have been reduced to a.  Ambiguous?  Well, a little, but not too much for native speakers.  And it's not a modern thing either - writers as far back as the 1900's have complained about native speakers doing this.  So feel free.

This, incidentally, is where the Hebridean form na (more commonly known as an do (rinn, ràinig etc.) comes from - an do > an a > na [nə] ... the word 'cool' springs to my mind, but then I'm insane anyway!

More to come, watch this space.