Publisher's Synopsis
"Airneán" is a collection of Irish texts which have been transcribed from the speech of seven native speakers from the Carna area of West Galway. The recordings were made in the early 1960s when some of the speakers were already at an advanced age, and thus reflects to a large extent the dialect of an older generation in the area. The transcriptions are presented as nine texts which appear in the form of dialogue. Many aspects of life in the region (history, folklore, etc.) are discussed, and the dialogues contain valuable information on customs and beliefs. A system of orthography based on the dialect of the speakers has been employed so that all noteworthy phonological features have been recorded. No attempt has been made to alter or to edit the speech of the informants thus leaving all syntactic and grammatical idiosyncracies as recorded. Part II contains a full analysis of the texts. The orthographical system is discussed and many phonological, morphological and syntactic features are analysed in detail. Statistical evidence is used where necessary, especially where two or more usages occur side by side in the dialect. This section also contains a full list of plural formations for nouns, a discussion of genitival formations and the use of the genitive, a full list of verbal adjectives, prepositional pronouns, and a discussion of synthetic and analytical verbal forms and their use. A select glossary, lists of personal and place-names, and of English words also occuring in the corpus are also presented. The texts are summarised in English and further sociolinguistic features are treated.
