So you speak English. Why not travel to the land of saints and scholars where English has been lyrically embellished since the dark ages; a week or two in Ireland and I won’t even need a translation dictionary!
A few weeks of hearing your language dancing gracefully and coherantly across the Irish tongue might be more challenging than you think! Ireland may be a predominately english-speaking nation, but the thing that tickled my ears the most when I first moved here and that tends to confuse our stateside guests is some of the slang. So, below is the twenty-fifth in a series I’m publishing on some common Irish slang that used to confuse us when we first arrived.
T vs TH - Chances are, most places in Ireland, speakers will swap these two sounds, depending where they fall in a word.
It’s a well-known idiosyncrasy of the Irish accent that words beginning with “th” get changed to a hard “t” sound. If you’re not prepared for it, it can cause some confusion.
Despite the well-known Irish preference for hard “t” at the beginning of a word, Irish folks actually have no problems pronouncing the “th” sound. In fact, a hard “t” occurring mid-word will probably get changed to a “th.” However, should a “th” sound occur naturally mid-word, some regional dialects swap it for a hard “d” sound. Confused? Perhaps some examples will help:
Three - “tree” [Initial "th" becomes a hard "t"]
Butter - “buth-er” [mid-word hard "t" becomes a "th"]
Other - “udder” [mid-word "th" becomes a hard "d"]
Here’s a few more:
The - “tuh” [Initial "th" becomes a hard "t"]
Better - “beth-er” [mid-word hard "t" becomes a "th"]
Brother - “brudder” [mid-word "th" becomes a hard "d"]




{ 1 trackback }
{ 2 comments }
I can’t say I totally agree with that, Up here in Donegal we have a decent amount of control over our t’s and th’s.
If there’s any softening of a word such as butter or water, it’s usually in jest, and the r at the end is rolled ever so slightly, signifying the jocular nature of it further.
The worst thing in Ireland is the posh people who pronounce the TH in Thomas as the TH in through. It grates my head when people talk like that. I blame RTÉ. The others are perfectly normal though.
Comments on this entry are closed.