Sgrìobh Stephen Mulraney:

> >  BTW I do disagree with JRRT over Gaelic - I find it one of
> > the more pleasant sounding languages.

What did JRRT say about Gaelic?

> Me too.

Me three! But then again I'm biased. :)

> Of course, impressions of a language's pleasant-soundingness
> often increase with exposure (as you become more familiar with
the
> phoneme inventory, the allophonic range of each phoneme, etc),

I think you're right. I also think that the emotional attachment
one feels towards a language certainly influences one's
impressions of that language's nicesoundingness as well.

> My brief acquaintance with(Scottish) Gaelic suggests that it's
> even more attractive

Naturally! ;-)

A couple of interesting points about Scottish Gaelic: one is
that it seems to be more phonologically conservative than
Irish -- preserving final fricatives that Irish has lost (e.g.
SG biadh vs. IG bia, SG ceannaich vs. IG ceannaigh),
preservation of orthographic "ao" as a distinct vowel /M:/ (is
that the X-SAMPA? IPA inverted lowercase m) where Irish has
merged it with /E/ or /i/, and such like. Irish seems more
grammatically conservative, though. Also, back to the
pleasant-sounding thing, I thought it interesting that I've
heard a lot of non-Gaelic speakers describe the sound of SG as
"harsh" -- more so than Irish -- but Gaelic speakers seem to
find that quality attractive. One epithet I've heard applied to
"good" Gaelic by native speakers is "cruaidh" (hard, hardy,
tough, austere, stern, etc.). Actually, one of the best
descriptions of the sound of Gaelic I've ever seen was in a
rather silly novel (involving magic-weilding, pagan, ancient
Gaels who survived to the present day) in which the language was
described as "craggy and liquid both".

> (I particularly like the pronunciation of |b d g| as
> [p t k], and |p t k| as something like [hp ht xk]
> when non-initial.

Basically, in most SG dialects all stops are unvoiced; the
difference is that |b d g| are unaspirated whereas |p t c| are
aspirated. In initial position the aspiration in the latter set
follows the stop [ph th kh], in non-initial position the
aspiration precedes the stop [hp ht hk]. In theory, anyway; in
actual usage the preaspiration only occurs in stressed
syllables, usually (but not always) after short vowels, e.g. the
final [k] in "faic" is preaspirated but the one in "chunnaic" is
not. And the actual realisation of the preasipration varies
dialectally from [hp ht hk] to [xp xt xk]. The most common
pattern is [hp ht xk]. There are (or were, they're mostly gone
now) dialects in the southwest that do not have preaspiration at
all, like Irish and Manx Gaelic.

> To my mind, it's a good example of what I might
> assume to be a much too far-reaching rule
> (what, no [b d g] in the interiors of words, ever?!)

Actually, the voiceless unaspirated stops [p t k] do often
become voiced following a nasal, e.g. |bata| [paht@] but |am
bata| [@m baht@]. This likewise varies from dialect to dialect;
in some dialects even the voiceless aspirated stops become
voiced after a nasal (e.g. |cat| [kaht], |an cat| [@N gaht]),
and in Lewis the stop becomes assimilated to the nasal but the
aspiration remains, producing a set of sound changes more or
less identical to the Welsh soft mutation (e.g. |am bata|
[@maht@], |an cat| [@Nhaht])!

Thomas (Gaelophile :-)