Irish consonant mutations in English loanwords

One of the most unique features of the Irish language (as well as its sisters, such as Scots Gaelic and Welsh) is the morpho-phonological system of initial consonant mutation. Irish has two principal mutations: lenition, which converts plosives to fricatives (while preserving voicing) and debuccalizes or deletes radical fricatives; and eclipsis, which replaces voiceless plosives with voiced plosives, voiced plosives with nasals, and fricatives with glides. These two mutation paradigms are robust in modern Irish and both apply to nouns, verbs, and adjectives to encode a variety of grammatical information: compare a cat ‘her cat’ and a gcat ‘his cat,’ which differ only in initial mutation, with the first having no mutation and the second undergoing eclipsis (/k/→ /g/). This paper concerns the case of English words loaned into Irish and the degree to which speakers incorporate them into these mutation paradigms. Theoretically, we can understand that Irish speakers encountering English loans could incorporate them into their morpho-phonology in one of two ways: either by leaving the English words untouched or by treating them like Irish words and mutating them as necessary. Previous studies of conversational and elicited data, like Nancy Stenson’s 1990 survey of Ráth Cairn Irish, established that different initial consonants are mutated at different rates in loans, but go no further in attempting to explain why the consonants differ in this regard. My reading of Stenson’s data demonstrates that, although all segments accept eclipsis fairly readily, there are three levels of resistance to lenition: those segments which do not significantly resist lenition (namely /p/→/f/ , /b/→/v/, /m/→/w/, /k/→/x/, and /g/→/ɣ/, which are realized in 75% or more of tokens), those that resist it partially (/t/ →/h/, /d/→/ɣ/, and /s/→/h/, which are realized in 30-50% of tokens) and those that resist it strongly (this last group consisting only of /f/→/∅/, which occurs in only 6% of tokens). I propose an Optimality Theory analysis to account for these differences, positing that the intermediate class of consonants resist lenition because they violate a high-ranked faithfulness constraint (namely IDENT-PLACE) in the process of mutating into their lenited forms. I further posit that /f/ resists lenition even more thoroughly because the mutation violates an even more highly-ranked constraint which prohibits consonant deletion. I also address the unique sociolinguistic landscape of Irish in the modern day and consider some of the interesting questions at the intersection of language revitalization and this phonological phenomena: seeing as Stenson’s data is nearly 30 years old, how might the trends of mutation changed in the interim? Ideally, a large study obtaining conversational data of Irish speakers from different parts of the country (and even in Northern Ireland) could yield fascinating results and serve to either corroborate or question my conclusions here. References: Mícheál Ó Sidhail (1989). Modern Irish: Grammatical Structure and Dialectical Variation. Cambridge University Press.Ní Chasaide, Ailbhe (1999). "Irish". Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge University Press. pp. 111–16. Chudak, Magdalena (2010). “Recent English Loanwords in Irish and the Interchange of Initial Segments.” pp. 61-70Conroy, Kevin (2008). Celtic initial consonant mutations – nghath and bhfuil. Stenson, Nancy (1990). “Patterns of mutation in Irish Loanwords”. Éigse 24. pp. 9-25