Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/252

 the difficulty or impossibility of nasalising the sound of ao. The difficulty is such that when a gets the sound of ao in the diphthongs ia and ua in the west of Ross-shire, for example, though i or u is nasalised, ao is not, in such words as fiamh, buan. The attempt to nasalise ao changes more or less the character of the vowel; hence the nasal û for ao in Argyll and perhaps also the universal û nasal or not for ao in other districts. The sound that at first, or, at all events, at one time took the place of ao only when nasalised, has since taken the place of that vowel entirely.

In Irish ao in general gets the sound of u in Ulster, of our Gaelic ì in Connaught, and of our é in Munster, but apparently there are more exceptions and more varieties of sound than in Scottish Gaelic.

The vowel e, like o, has an open and a close sound. The open sound, when short, is like that of e in English ‘bed,’ ‘less,’ ‘met,’ and when long is like the same sound lengthened, and is then written è. The close sound is like the vowel in English ‘whey,’ short or long as the case may be, and in the latter case is written é. It rarely stands alone as the vowel of a syllable. On the other hand it is the only vowel that may be followed by any of the others and preceded by none. The only exceptions are Gael, Gaelig, etc., which are unusual and bad renderings of Gàidheal, Gàidhlig, etc. The lengthening of short e before long liquids and the change of a long e (eu, etc.) into ia have been fully dealt with, but some other changes affecting the vowel or digraphs into which it enters remain to be noticed.

In the digraph ea the vowel that is sounded in some cases is e and in others a. In East Perthshire a is heard when the digraph is followed by l, nn, rr or rd, and e in other cases. The exceptions are few, e.g., seachd (seven) and Geamhradh (winter). In Arran a is somewhat more