Fòram na Gàidhlig

Thanks all - I'm familiar with the sounds/phonetics of Gaelic (more so Irish), just not overly sure about Scots Gaelic - in many places where the aspirated consonants (like gh, dh, etc) would be silent in Irish, I've heard them pronounced in Scots Gaelic.

The ü is very interesting - I have a lot of folk songs in Gaelic where a few of the singers use this sound a lot and I've been trying to figue out what combination of letters gives that sound - so, it's a dialect thing??

"Tu" I would pronounce as /tu/ "too", not /tü/ "tü" (as in French). Yeah, the "gh" at ends of words seems to be /g/ often - again, I'm kind of going by the sung version, but it seems that broad "dh" and "gh" are sort of loosing their traditional pronunciations in favor of /d/ and /g/. Hard to know how to properly pronounce a word sometimes!

MikeS wrote:The ü is very interesting - I have a lot of folk songs in Gaelic where a few of the singers use this sound a lot and I've been trying to figue out what combination of letters gives that sound - so, it's a dialect thing??

Interesting indeed.

I believe it all started with the ADH group.
As the D got more lenited, the vowel quality of the A changed (see adhbhar, which is pretty uniformly pronounced, in my experience).
Now, as the ADH is the most common verbal noun ending, it's not surprising that in some dialects the A in the verbal noun deanamh borrowed that sound.

MikeS wrote:
The ü is very interesting - I have a lot of folk songs in Gaelic where a few of the singers use this sound a lot and I've been trying to figue out what combination of letters gives that sound - so, it's a dialect thing??

This is heard mainly in the Lewis dialect(s), it certainly isn't present in Harris Gaelic (and I would assume Skye and Uist Gaelic as well as they are quite close).

I can't comment on other dialects

Absolutely de rigueur Berwickshire Gaelic! (I jest, of course). However, the same happens in Welsh, e.g. "gwddf" (throat) is often "gwddw" when spoken (theoretical pron. more-or-less "goodhv" - "dh" = TH in "then"). "Beers" in Welsh is "cyrfeydd", from the old singular "cwrf" (koorv) - but this has so long been pronounced "cwrw" that it's now actually officially spelt that way. And, of course, "tha mi - I am": in trad. Welsh, "yr wyf fi" - now usually said "rw i" (often "rydw i" or "dw i"). So it ain't just Gaelic where the "mh" sound tends to go to a "u" type sound - particularly at the end of words.

It should be remembered that a large proportion of native Gaelic speakers speak Lewis Gaelic, so it's hardly a surprise if many who learn Gaelic adopt Lewisisms in their speech.