ATR in Scottish Gaelic Tense Sonorants: A Preliminary Report

In the modern Goidelic languages, there are two classes of sonorants, called “tense” and “lax”. One way the two classes are distinguished is by the quality of the preceding vowel: before the so-called “tense” sonorants, vowels are either lengthened or diphthongized, depending on the vowel and on the dialect. It is not always clear, however, that there is a difference to be found in the sonorants themselves. The phenomenon of vowel diphthongization/lengthening in modern Goidelic languages dates back to their ancestor language, Old Irish. In Old Irish, the coronal sonorants [l], [n] and [r] came in two versions, which correspond to the present day tense/lax contrast. (Historical records are such that the nature of the Old Irish contrast is unknown, though the Scottish Gaelic orthography suggests a geminate/singleton distinction, see Figure 2.) Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic are closely related branches of Goidelic languages. In both languages, vowel diphthongization is observed; in Scottish Gaelic there is also vowel lengthening before [r]. Examples (Ó Sé 1995) in Table 1 are taken from dialects of Modern Irish, showing the contrast between diphthongization and the lack thereof in vowels in each of the phonological environments. Capital letters are used to transcribe tense sonorants. In Scottish Gaelic, tense and lax sonorants contrast in codas, so for this study we focused on codas; onset distribution is less clear. We also focused only ∗This work was made possible in part by James S. McDonnell Foundation grant #220020045 BBNB to Diana Archangeli. We are also grateful for support from the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona, and to Colin Gorrie, Jessamyn Schertz, and Jae Hyun Sung for helpful discussion.