msv133 wrote:
Thank you so much.
So, in general, is úr the cork gaelic version of bhur?
No. We recently had this discussed in another thread. It's a historically attested spelling variant that represents a localised Munster pronunciation without the initial
bh. It seems likely to me that this pronunciation is still in use, though it seems that most native speakers in Munster tend to both write and pronounce
bhur these days.
In that other thread djwebb posited that
bhur may have been adopted by native speakers in speech as a result of the use of standardised spelling in the school system. I suspect the implication is that only
úr would have been used in speech and writing before that point. I'm not convinced by this suggestion, though. It seems unlikely that an entire province would give way to standard spelling and pronunciation in this isolated case, while strongly maintaining other Munster variants. It seems more plausible to me that both
úr and
bhur were in use historically, and úr has since become less common (perhaps under pressure from the standard, but not as a direct result of it). Unfortunately, without more historical recordings of spoken Irish from about a century ago, it's not easy to be sure. Sources may survive from that time in which
bhur is written, but this doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't being pronounced
úr by Munster speakers.