Re: Irish pronunciation question

Cece <ceceliaarmstrong@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Jun 18, 11:55 am, Chuck Riggs <chri...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 17 Jun 2008 09:16:44 -0700, R H Draney <dadoc...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Saw a documentary the other night, one segment of which featured a
man on the streets of Dublin warning a performance artist that his
proposed installation might get him in trouble with the law...the
closed-captioning said he'd go to "gaol", a word I've always
understood to sound exactly like the American "jail"...the
Irishman, however, kept pronouncing it "goal"; is this usual?...r

To my surprise, the word is pronounced goal, according to one of the
women here.

The old OED has only /dZel/. I'll have to check the current OED when
I can.

The on-line version has only /dZeIl/. Interestingly, though, the
earliest citations have it spelled "gayhol" or "gayhole". The
etymology says that the two spellings, and, originally pronunciations
came from Northern or Norman French ("gaol") and Central or Parisian
French ("jail"). They say that the /g/ form

still remains as a written form in the archaic spelling _gaol_
(chiefly due to statutory and official tradition); but this is
obsolete in the spoken language, where the surviving word is
_jail_... Hence though both forms _gaol_, _jail_, are still
written, only the latter is spoken. In U.S. _jail_ is the official
spelling. It is difficult to say whether the form _goal_(_e_,
common, alike in official and general use, from the 16th to the
18th c., was merely an erroneous spelling of _gaol_, after this
had itself become an archaism, or was phonetic

So they appear to be unaware of anybody pronouncing it /goUl/.

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