Quote:
I think, that Old Irish and Classical Irish are different enough that Donegal Irish might be closer to Old Irish, while being further from Classical Irish (correct me if I'm wrong).
For verbal morphology, I think Donegal Irish is closer to Classical Irish simply because Classical Irish is closer in time too. But I think the irregular verbs I mentioned were more or less the same in Old Irish and in Classical Irish.
Doesn't Donegal Irish have a different quality for the long vowels than Classical Irish and the stress pattern would be different? Classical Irish has stress identical to Connacht Irish (especially the way short vowels are preserved when not under stress).Donegal Irish doesn't change much the quality of long vowels:
á is a: or æː
é is e: or ɛː
í is iː
ó is ɔː (or oː beside a nasal consonant and in certain words like tóg)
ú is uː
The stress pattern, as far as I know, hasn't changed since Old Irish in both Donegal and Connachta Irish: it is on the 1st syllable except in compounds words and in certain loanwords.
It has only changed in Munster Irish, where other syllables can be stressed.
Connachta Irish doesn't preserve unstressed short vowels more than any other dialect, a and e become ə most of the time, i is ɪ, o is ɔ, u is ʊ... and I think it was already like that in Old Irish except when the vowel was at the very end of a word (final a would be pronounced [a] in Old Irish while it's ə in Modern Irish).
Classical Irish actual left it as a choice to use the synthetic and analytic forms.