A Dialect of Donegal
Being the Speech of Meenawannia in the Parish of Glenties. Phonology and Texts

An attempt at a scientific description of a northern dialect of Irish, first published in 1906.

E. C. Quiggin (Author)

9781107645530, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 February 2012

258 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.33 kg

Originally published in 1906, this study by E. C. Quiggin was, as its author put it, 'the first serious attempt at a scientific description of a northern dialect of Irish'. Quiggin maintained that collecting linguistic data from the people who were born before the famine was of immediate concern because their particular grasp of the vernacular would help shed much-needed light on the mysteries of Old and Middle Irish orthography. Drawn primarily from evidence of the speech found in a hamlet called Meenawannia near Donegal, this volume represents a fascinating case study of the Irish language at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Introductory
Part I. The Vowel System: 1. The back vowels
2. The front vowels
3. The irrational vowels
4. The dipthongs
5. Nasal vowels
Part II. The Consonants: 1. h, j, w
2. The liquids and nasals
3. The spirants
4. The labial, dental and guttural stops
Part III. Synthesis: 1. Notes on the consonants
2. Metathesis
3. Dissimulation
4. Loss of consonant
5. Loss of vowel
6. Vowel-shortening
7. Uncertainty of initial
8. Sandhi
9. Vowel-length
10. Stress
11. Stress of compounds
12. Sentence-stress
13. Intonation
14. Characteristics of Donegal Irish
Word lists
Texts
Notes on the texts.

Subject Areas: Linguistics [CF]