Irish and Scottish Gaelic sound changes?

Natural languages and linguistics
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Jonlang
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Irish and Scottish Gaelic sound changes?

Post by Jonlang »

I'm looking for some documentation on PIE to Modern Irish and Primitive Irish to Scottish Gaelic sound changes. Index Diachronica isn't very forthcoming. I've found some but Google isn't returning a great deal of stuff which is free to access.
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Darren
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Re: Irish and Scottish Gaelic sound changes?

Post by Darren »

Benjamin Fortson's Indo-European Language and Culture has a pretty good description of changes from PIE to Old Irish which I happened to be reading last night. This isn't a full list of changes but it should cover everything major, though for some reason he doesn't go into detail for any modern languages.


PIE to common Celtic

ḱ ǵ ǵʰ > k g gʰ
p > Ø "in most positions"
gʷ > b (notably not affecting *gʷʰ)
bʰ dʰ gʰ gʷʰ > b d g gʷ
dt > ss
m > n /_#
H̥ > a
r̥ l̥ > ri li ("but the outcomes *ar al are also found")
r̥̄ l̥̄ m̥̄ n̥̄ > rā lā mā nā
H > Ø
ō > ū (in final syllables)
ō > ā (otherwise)


Celtic to Old Irish
Fortson discusses Insular Celtic first, but then goes on to cover all the same changes again under Old Irish, so I've just lumped them together.

kʷ gʷ > k g
lenition - intervocalic stops lenided to fricatives, even across some word boundaries
nasalisation - voiced stops become nasals, voiceless stops become voiced stops, vowels become n+V (when the previous word ends in a nasal, which is later lost at some point he doesn't mention)
Ø > h /V# #_V (h added to a vowel-initial word following a word that doesn't cause mutation)
i e cause palatalisation ("In the early stages of this change, only i's in certain syllables had this effect") - this gives rise to slender vs. broad consonants.
o > a /_[–stress]
eu ou > ó ("later diphthongised to úa")
ei > é (later ía "depending on whether the vowel that originally stood in the following syllable was front or back")
i u > e o /$(C)(C)[a,o] (a-infection)
e o > i u /$(C)(C)[i,u] (i-infection)
"loss of most final syllables"
syncope - "syncope in Irish hit every other syllable after the initial (stressed) syllable"
Moose-tache
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Re: Irish and Scottish Gaelic sound changes?

Post by Moose-tache »

This list leaves out a lot of stuff.

Some of it is fairly minor changes like kt > xt, or the shortening of long vowels before final nasals. Some of it is speculative stuff like two plosives geminating before geminates shorten anyway. Some important sound changes to keep in mind:

Loss of semivowels (w becomes f in some cases, disappears in others, y disappears universally, although after things like vowel affectation)
Loss of nasals in VNC sequences
The game of musical chairs the vowels play is far more complex. There are multiple rounds of affectation, shortening, elision, and breaking. Most sources I've read haven't even tried to describe them all with confidence.

As for the difference between Irish and Scottish Goidelic, that's a good question. Scottish Gaelic seems to lower some stressed vowels to a, but for the most part the vowel differences aren't systematic in any obvious way (the spelling hides this: ea~eu for example is a spelling convention). Syncope clearly works differently in Scottish Gaelic, if at all, and that is believed to be one of the later sound changes in Irish, so that gives us an idea of when in its development Goidelic split into two languages.
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Linguoboy
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Re: Irish and Scottish Gaelic sound changes?

Post by Linguoboy »

Moose-tache wrote: Thu May 12, 2022 7:39 pmAs for the difference between Irish and Scottish Goidelic, that's a good question. Scottish Gaelic seems to lower some stressed vowels to a, but for the most part the vowel differences aren't systematic in any obvious way (the spelling hides this: ea~eu for example is a spelling convention).
Has Scottish lowered or has Irish raised? It's not always easy to say. Raising of low vowels is common in Irish, and this isn't consistently shown in the orthography, e.g. glaine, comparative of glan "clean", often pronounced /ˈɡlˠɪnʲə/ (i.e. as if spelled gloine). This also demonstrates a very common shift to a front vowel before a palatalised consonant where Scottish Gaelic retains the original /a/ (i.e. [ˈkl̪ˠaɲə]).
Moose-tache
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Re: Irish and Scottish Gaelic sound changes?

Post by Moose-tache »

Linguoboy wrote: Fri May 13, 2022 10:11 am
Moose-tache wrote: Thu May 12, 2022 7:39 pmAs for the difference between Irish and Scottish Goidelic, that's a good question. Scottish Gaelic seems to lower some stressed vowels to a, but for the most part the vowel differences aren't systematic in any obvious way (the spelling hides this: ea~eu for example is a spelling convention).
Has Scottish lowered or has Irish raised? It's not always easy to say. Raising of low vowels is common in Irish, and this isn't consistently shown in the orthography, e.g. glaine, comparative of glan "clean", often pronounced /ˈɡlˠɪnʲə/ (i.e. as if spelled gloine). This also demonstrates a very common shift to a front vowel before a palatalised consonant where Scottish Gaelic retains the original /a/ (i.e. [ˈkl̪ˠaɲə]).
Great point. I assumed Scottish was the one that changed, because the Irish vowel corresponding to Scottish a was heterogeneous. But looking back at the examples, it seems that most of the time when Scottish has a and Irish doesn't, Irish has either o or e according to whether the following consonant is broad or slender, respectively (do, cos, codail, cloch, and feic, seilg, deis, all of which have a in Scottish). There are exceptions, though, like luigh vs laigh, and a huge number of words where Irish and Scottish match vowels in the same environments where other words would show variation.
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