Fòram na Gàidhlig

4 lèirmheasan glè mhath agus mionaideach air Amazon a-nis, fear dhiubh co-dhiù le ball an seo... taing do Thrissel!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews ... Descending

(although I'm still not 100% clear on where grinning O arises).

You mean when you get it? Usually in cases of -oi- in a stressed syllable or when -aoi- is followed by a bh, dh, gh, mh (I think that's all). It's not very predicable. The worst pair is coire vs coire, one with the grinning o and one without. Goid has it, bois hasn't... it's a funny one.

My advice would be to focus on having grinning o in core words, (like goid) as for the rest, people usually put any variance there down to dialect differences as not all agree anyway.

I had always thought that the slender/broad distinction held even for weak N, L, R.

I don't blame you. The way Celtic linguistics writes these is NOT helpful. They have the tendency to take the orthographic lnr, capitalise according to strength and then add an apostrophe to indicate slenderness, so you get L L' l' l N N' n n' R r' r. Which is really little else than restating the orthography with a minor clue to strength. I know why they do it - as not all varieties of Irish and Gaelic have dealt with the 4-4-3 system the same way (Harris, for example, has L L' l' l in that notation but in hardcore IPA, that's actually l?? ? l l?) in that system but it does little to telling you what these actually are phonetically. I took me about a month to pin each down, in particular the Irish authorts.

Or, I'm possible misreading you. You must be very careful to distinguish spelling and sound. Broad/slender has implications for weak AND strong lnr. Or you mean something entirely different

Taing do Thrissel, a bharrachd air a sin, tha an lèirmheas a' còrdadh rium fìor mhath