The Rhotic Consonant(s) in Contemporary Modern Irish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The subject of this major research paper (MRP) is the status of rhotic consonant(s) in the phonemic inventory of Modern Irish (Gaeilge, Nua-Ghaeilge). Traditional studies of the phonologies of dialects of Irish have described the rhotic in Irish as consisting of the alveolar tap (/ɾ/) with contrastive palatalized and velarized secondary articulations (/ɾj/ and /ɾɣ/) (Ó Cuív 1944; de Bhaldraithe 1966; Hamilton 1974; Sutton 1993; Ó Baoill 1996; Ó Raghallaigh 2014). The alveolar approximate ([ɹ]) as an allophone of /ɾ/ has also recently been attested in some studies (Ó Sé 2000: 19; Hickey 2014; Kukhto & Nikolaev 2016). However, the emergence of this allophone, and the precise circumstances under which it occurs, have largely been unexplored. This is not to say that previous scholars have ignored the occurrence of /ɹ/ broadly, but potentially that this is a new and ongoing phenomenon. As an example, previous work of the rhotic of Montréal French has shown that changes like this can occur rapidly (Sankoff & Blondeau 2007). Most previous studies of Irish phonetics and phonology have focused on speakers living in a Gaeltacht, the rural traditionally Irish speaking geographic regions primarily located on the Atlantic fringe of the island. However, the expansion of private Irish-medium schooling in the form of Gaelscoileanna since the 1970’s, as well as substantial sustained capital and political investment from successive Irish governments have produced a great number of high-level L2 users, as well as native speakers from non-Gaeltacht backgrounds. A part of the impetus to this research is to include these “new” speakers in the conversations around language change and variation in Irish as well, particularly as the Gaeltachtaí continue to be threatened and as “urban Irish” speakers begin to form a larger and larger portion of the language’s user base. There is also evidence uncovered in scholarly work that Irish phonology and phonetics are changing in other, broader ways, even amongst Gaeltacht speakers (Welby et al. 2017; Müller et al. 2019).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".