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Eclipsis
Irish, like all modern Celtic languages, is characterised by its initial consonant mutations. These mutations affect the initial consonant of a word under specific morphological and syntactic conditions. The mutations are an important tool in understanding the relationship between two words and can differentiate various meanings. Irish, like Scottish Gaelic and Manx, features two initial consonant mutations: lenition ( ) and eclipsis ( ) (the alternative names, '' aspiration'' for lenition and ''nasalisation'' for eclipsis, are also used, but those terms are misleading). Originally these mutations were phonologically governed external sandhi effects: lenition was caused by a consonant being between two vowels, and eclipsis when a nasal preceded an obstruent, including at the beginning of a word. Irish also features t- prothesis and h-prothesis, related phenomena which affect vowel-initial words. See Irish phonology for a discussion of the symbols used on this page. Hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Irish Language
Irish (Standard Irish: ), also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic ( ), is a Celtic language of the Indo-European language family. It is a member of the Goidelic languages of the Insular Celtic sub branch of the family and is indigenous language, indigenous to the island of Ireland. It was the majority of the population's first language until the 19th century, when English (language), English gradually became dominant, particularly in the last decades of the century, in what is sometimes characterised as a result of linguistic imperialism. Today, Irish is still commonly spoken as a first language in Ireland's Gaeltacht regions, in which 2% of Ireland's population lived in 2022. The total number of people (aged 3 and over) in Ireland who declared they could speak Irish in April 2022 was 1,873,997, representing 40% of respondents, but of these, 472,887 said they never spoke it and a further 551,993 said they only spoke it within the education system. Linguistic analyses o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Consonant Mutation
Consonant mutation is change in a consonant in a word according to its morphological or syntactic environment. Mutation occurs in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of all modern Celtic languages. Initial consonant mutation is also found in Indonesian or Malay, in Nivkh, in Southern Paiute and in several West African languages such as Fula. The Nilotic language Dholuo, spoken in Kenya, shows mutation of stem-final consonants, as does English to a small extent. Mutation of initial, medial and final consonants is found in Modern Hebrew. Also, Japanese exhibits word medial consonant mutation involving voicing, '' rendaku'', in many compounds. Uralic languages like Finnish show consonant gradation, a type of consonant mutation. Similar sound changes Initial consonant mutation must not be confused with sandhi, which can refer to word-initial alternations triggered by their phonological environm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nasalisation
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalization is indicated by printing a tilde diacritic above the symbol for the sound to be nasalized: is the nasalized equivalent of , and is the nasalized equivalent of . A subscript diacritic , called an or , is sometimes seen, especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would interfere with the superscript tilde. For example, are more legible in most fonts than . Nasal vowels Many languages have nasal vowels to different degrees, but only a minority of world languages around the world have nasal vowels as contrasting phonemes. That is the case, among others, of French, Portuguese, Hindustani, Nepali, Breton, Gheg Albanian, Hmong, Hokkien, Yoruba, and Cherokee. Those nasal v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manx Language
Manx ( or , or ), also known as Manx Gaelic, is a Goidelic language, Gaelic language of the insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family. Manx is the heritage language of the Manx people. Although few children native to the Isle of Man speak Manx as a first language, there has been a steady increase in the number of speakers since the death of Ned Maddrell in 1974. He was considered to be the last speaker to grow up in a Manx-speaking community environment. Despite this, the language has never fallen completely out of use, with a minority having some knowledge of it as a heritage language, and it is still an important part of the island's Culture of the Isle of Man, culture and cultural heritage. Manx is often cited as a good example of language revitalization efforts; in 2015, around 1,800 people had varying levels of second-language conversational ability. Since the late 20th century, Manx has become more visible ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Castle Street Signs, Strabane, January 2010
A castle is a type of fortification, fortified structure built during the Middle Ages predominantly by the nobility or royalty and by Military order (monastic society), military orders. Scholars usually consider a ''castle'' to be the private fortified house, fortified residence of a lord or noble. This is distinct from a mansion, palace, and villa, whose main purpose was exclusively for ''pleasance'' and are not primarily fortresses but may be fortified. Use of the term has varied over time and, sometimes, has also been applied to structures such as hill forts and 19th- and 20th-century homes built to resemble castles. Over the Middle Ages, when genuine castles were built, they took on a great many forms with many different features, although some, such as curtain wall (fortification), curtain walls, arrowslits, and portcullises, were commonplace. European-style castles originated in the 9th and 10th centuries after the fall of the Carolingian Empire, which resulted ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elide
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced "firs' light" (). Many other terms are used to refer to specific cases where sounds are omitted. Citation forms and contextual forms A word may be spoken individually in what is called the Lemma (morphology), citation form. This corresponds to the pronunciation given in a dictionary. However, when words are spoken in context, it often happens that some sounds that belong to the citation form are omitted. Elision is not an all-or-nothing process: elision is more likely to occur in some styles of speaking and less likely in others. Many writers have described the styles ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fortis And Lenis
In linguistics, ''fortis'' ( ; Latin for 'strong') and ''lenis'' (, ; Latin for 'weak'), sometimes identified with 'tense' and 'lax', are pronunciations of consonants with relatively greater and lesser energy, respectively. English has fortis consonants, such as the ''p'' in ''pat'', with a corresponding lenis consonant, such as the ''b'' in ''bat''. Fortis and lenis consonants may be distinguished by tenseness or other characteristics, such as voicing, aspiration, glottalization, velarization, length, and length of nearby vowels. ''Fortis'' and ''lenis'' were coined for languages where the contrast between sounds such as 'p' and 'b' does not involve voicing (vibration of the vocal cords). History Originally, the terms were used to refer to an impressionistic sense of strength differences, though more sophisticated instruments eventually gave the opportunity to search for the acoustic and articulatory signs. For example, tested whether articulatory strength could be det ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middle Irish
Middle Irish, also called Middle Gaelic (, , ), is the Goidelic language which was spoken in Ireland, most of Scotland and the Isle of Man from AD; it is therefore a contemporary of Late Old English and Early Middle English. The modern Goidelic languages—Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic—are all descendants of Middle Irish. Grammar Middle Irish is a fusional, VSO, nominative-accusative language, and makes frequent use of lenition. Nouns decline for two genders: masculine and feminine, though traces of neuter declension persist; three numbers: singular, dual, plural; and five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, prepositional, vocative. Adjectives agree with nouns in gender, number, and case. Verbs conjugate for three tenses: past, present, future; four moods: indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative; independent and dependent forms. Verbs conjugate for three persons and an impersonal, agentless form ( agent). There are a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epenthetic
In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the first syllable ('' prothesis''), the last syllable ('' paragoge''), or between two syllabic sounds in a word. The opposite process in which one or more sounds are removed is referred to as syncope or elision. Etymology The word ''epenthesis'' comes from and ''en-'' and ''thesis'' . Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence for the addition of a consonant, and for the addition of a vowel, svarabhakti (in Sanskrit) or alternatively anaptyxis (). Uses Epenthesis arises for a variety of reasons. The phonotactics of a given language may discourage vowels in hiatus or consonant clusters, and a consonant or vowel may be added to help pronunciation. Epenthesis may be represented in writing, or it may be a feature only of the spoken language. Separating vowels A consonant may be added to separate vowels in hiatus, as is the case with linking and intrusive R in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fusion (linguistics)
In phonetics and historical linguistics, fusion, or coalescence, is a sound change where two or more segments with distinctive features merge into a single segment. This can occur both on consonants and in vowels. A word like ''educate'' is one that may exhibit fusion, e.g. or . A merger between two segments can also occur between word boundaries, an example being the phrase ''got ya'' being pronounced like ''gotcha'' . Most cases of fusion lead to allophonic variation, though some sequences of segments may lead to wholly distinct phonemes. A common form of fusion is found in the development of nasal vowels, which frequently become phonemic when final nasal consonants are lost from a language. This occurred in French and Portuguese. Compare the French words "a white wine" with their English cognates, ''one, wine, blank,'' which retain the sound of the letter Ns. Often the resulting sound has the place of articulation of one of the source sounds and the manner of articulatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Celtic
Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, is the hypothetical ancestral proto-language of all known Celtic languages, and a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. It is not attested in writing but has been partly Linguistic reconstruction, reconstructed through the comparative method. Proto-Celtic is generally thought to have been spoken between 1300 and 800 BC, after which it began to split into different languages. Proto-Celtic is often associated with the Urnfield culture and particularly with the Hallstatt culture. Celtic languages share common features with Italic languages that are not found in other branches of Indo-European, suggesting the possibility of an earlier Italo-Celtic linguistic unity. Proto-Celtic is currently being reconstructed through the comparative method by relying on later Celtic languages. Though Continental Celtic presents much substantiation for Proto-Celtic phonology, and some for its morphology (linguistics), morphology, recorded material is too scanty to allow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
