GC's Gaelic for Beginners
Grad-inntrigeadh
Lesson 3 - Go with the flow
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Again, a listening exercise. I know you're all chomping at the bits to learn how to actually say anything, but please bear with me. It will help you get your pronunciation and perception off to a good start.
1. Read the page on Articulatory Phonetics. Please don't try to understand and memorize everything I wrote there yet, just try to get a bit of an overview. Pay special attention to the sections on stops and laryngeals only.
2. Go again to Radio nan Gàidheal and pick any show you might feel like listening to. Now, this time I want you to listen to the following: in Gaelic, words aren't separate entities like in English, but they all flow together. One of the consequences of this is that in the middle of a sentence, you don't add a glottal stop ([ʔ]) to the beginning of words that start with a vowel. You only do that when you have paused for breath, or at the beginning of a sentence. For comparison, another language that has the same behavior in regard to this is French.
2. Go again to Radio nan Gàidheal and pick any show you might feel like listening to. Now, this time I want you to listen to the following: in Gaelic, words aren't separate entities like in English, but they all flow together. One of the consequences of this is that in the middle of a sentence, you don't add a glottal stop ([ʔ]) to the beginning of words that start with a vowel. You only do that when you have paused for breath, or at the beginning of a sentence. For comparison, another language that has the same behavior in regard to this is French.
Last edited: 16 June 2022 07:20:26