Conas athá sibh a chairde? Thá súil agum go bhfuil sibh go maith ar fad.


Can anyone knowledgeable on Ulster dialects explain to me when do é and ó have the open long vowel sound [ɛː] [ɔː] and when do they have the closed long vowel sound [eː] [oː]? Does it just depend on the word? Do different dialect within Ulster have variation, i.e. a certain word having [oː] in one part of Ulster and [ɔː] in another?

I know that this also occurs in Scottish Gaelic (they even used to have a different diacritic for it until recently, é and ó for [eː] [oː], and è and ò for [ɛː] [ɔː], I really don't understand why they got rid of this, they should really bring it back), I found that mór in U.I. and S.G. are both pronounced with [oː] and that bó in U.I. and bò in S.G are both pronounced with [ɔː]. Is it a general rule that if a word has an open or a close é/ó in U.I. it will also have it in S.G.?

According to Wikipedia (which I know, and am sorry, is not such a great source) says that ó is pronounced as o: when next to m, ṁ, n, and ɔ: in other positions. I wonder if this is related to how ó is pronounced as ú in some Munster dialects when next to a nasal. It also lists that e: is pronounced as [e:] when morpheme final, [ɛə] when before broad consonants, and [ei] when before slender consonants (but I couldn't find [ɛ:]).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Irish#Vowels

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I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar

phouka.com (which is, in my opinion, probably better than Wikipedia) also says that closed ó occurs beside n, m, but nothing about open é.

http://www.phouka.com/gaelic/sounds/sounds.htm

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I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar

The main author of Irish phonology articles on Wikipedia is Mahagaja (f.k.a. Angr) who is a knowledgable linguist even under his real name (which I don't remember at the moment).
So, these articles - at least his contributions - are trustworthy.

Okay. Thank you, I just wasn't sure, that's why I also posted the quote from phouka.com

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I'm an intermediate speaker of the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Irish and also have knowledge on the old spelling
Soir gaċ síar, fé ḋeireaḋ thíar

Sup guys! So I was gaming with a buddy when he sent me a random link to https://arxua.com/ saying, “you’d like this one, no BS design.” At first, I thought it was a joke, but once I opened it, it looked way more modern than most platforms I’ve tried. I spent half an hour just browsing out of curiosity, and the UX felt way ahead of the usual suspects. Didn’t expect to be impressed but yeah, I was.

I’ve also come across that Munster feature where ó shifts to a ú-like sound near nasals, and I’ve wondered if it's some kind of historical assimilation or just a regional phonetic drift.

As for the vowel e:, yeah, the variations you mentioned line up with what I've read too. The [ɛ:] form might just be a sort of in-between realization or a phonetic variation that didn’t get a clear entry—some dialect descriptions can be inconsistent like that.

Interesting how much nuance there is, even within a single vowel depending on context!