hi thanks for your comments they will definitely be helpful in getting the article to a point where it's appropriate for more general audiences and not just trained linguists to answer some of your specific questions f mhar has u in some dialects because the rule that mid vowels are raised to high vowels before nasals including the formerly nasal mh applies to in many dialects this reminds me that i didn't discuss that raising in the article at all so i'll add a new section about it presently f and bh mh v are often pronounced with the bilabial fricatives instead of the labiodental f v unfortunately the published sources aren't very specific about when which versions are used the same is true for palatal vs palatovelar not that there's a huge difference between the two in the first place any individual speaker probably uses both interchangeably without even hearing a difference sometimes the standard orthography does a very poor job of representing a particular dialect's pronunciation of a word in the dialect i got the info from scanradh happens to be pronounced as if spelled scamhradh the pronunciation of cam is kaum per the discussion of lengthening diphthongization before fortis sonorants exactly how the fortis and lenis sonorants differ changes from dialect to dialect as i tried to show in the chart there isn't one unified pronunciation of the two types images of the vocal tract like the one you link to are fine for consonants but not much use for vowels as the differences between nearby vowels are too slight to be easily seen in them also they belong more on the pages about the sound in question than in this article i'm sorry if your heart sinks at the word largely but this page really isn't intended to help you get from spelling to pronunciation that's what irish orthography is for this page is for describing how irish is pronounced by native speakers regardless of the spelling the realizations of sh are also discussed at irish orthography though some discussion of the alternations between h and would probably not be amiss here i'll see what i can find about str oc there's no epenthesis when cn gn is pronounced cr gr because epenthesis is found only in munster and cr gr for cn gn is found only outside munster at abstract level vowel initial words all begin with either a front or back glide that triggers either palatalization or velarization is there a way to determine what is being triggered in each particular case well from the orthography yes if it starts with e or i palatalization is triggered if it it starts with a o or u velarization is triggered but from a purely phonological point of view no it has to be included as part of the lexical information of the word alternation in the table refers to the fact that some forms of a word e g the nominative case have one sound e g a long vowel with other related forms e g the genitive have another sound e g a short vowel gr