Welshness & Brithenig (was: reformed Welsh Spelling - comments?)

On Saturday, December 6, 2003, at 08:07 PM, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

> --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>
>> It seems as though we might both agree about
>> Andrew's use of |ff| and |f|.
>
> That's certainly one example. Dd, ll and rh are
> the others. They're enough to give it a Welsh
> feel and to make people think that B is,
> actually, Welsh; and people have made that
> mistake on more than one occasion.
I have noticed  :)

Strange how little is actually needed to give a conlang
the feel of some natlang or other.

>> But it's certainly not Welsh orthography. In
>> fact, as
>> I guess you know, it's a mainly of Romance &
>> Welsh.
>
> Yes, I kind of suspected the language is Romance!
> ;)
I know *you* did - but, as you've observed, it's surprising
the number of people who seem to miss the Romance bit &
only its Welshness.

[snip]

>> Besides the Welsh use of |ff| and |f|,
>> Brithenig has only |ll|, |dd| and |rh|.  As
>> none of these sounds
>> occur in any extant Romancelang, he has no
>> Romance models to go on.
>
> Which leads me to wonder if such would really
> survive into a Romance language.
I don't see any reason why the _sounds_ shouldn't
have survived.  /þ/ and /đ/ were both found in early
Old French.  And Romance langs do pick up other
sounds, e.g. the Slav high central unrounded vowel
is common enough in Romanian.

> But that's water
> over the dam, now. Not complaining, mind!
Indeed, not.
> Kerno
> has its share of unlikely stuff.
   :)

[snip]
>> And, perhaps oddly, the use of |k| for
>> /k/ before front vowels is both
>> non-(modern)Welsh and non-Romance.
>
> Common enough in, for ex., Spanish spelling
> reform schemes.
>
>> But, of course, it was common enough
>> in middle Welsh.
>
> And in older forms of Spanish and appears in Old
> French. I suspect it's from MW that Andrew got it
> from.
Yep - IIRC that's right.

[snip]
>> Ah well, I suspect neither you nor I would've
>> done things quite the same way;
>
> Certainly not! ;) Well, you can see what I did
> with the thing, anyway. I had no intention of
> following the historical Cornish paradigm in any
> way; only mimicking and expanding on what I found
> to be interesting in Cornish development. I did
> and still do follow some Cornish orthographical
> considerations.
Well, with different (main) versions of revived Cornish
you had plenty of orthographic variation to play with :)

> Enough that people
> (nonconlangers) unfamiliar with K think it's
> either Cornish or French. Thus far, one person
> has pinned it down to being a relative of
> Brithenig. The nearness of the charge was
> surprising, since I don't consider the two to be
> especially closely related, and they don't look
> much alike.
True.

> Curious though: what might you have done, had you
> decided to take on this project? Naturally, your
> familiarity with both Latin and Welsh would be of
> great advantage.
I shan't take on the project as Andrew has already come
up with Brithenig, and I don't want IB to become another
Auxland with competing versions of Brithenig.

Of course, I could have a parallel IB universe - but that
is silly IMO.

As it would've developed from the Vulgar Latin of the urbanized
S.E. of Britain & ancient British seems to have been similar to
continental Gallic & there was considerable trade between Britain
& north Gaul, I would've looked more closely at the development of
V.L. in north Gaul; I would also have taken more regard of developments
in Breton.

I won't work out a full system, for the reasons I give above, but I
think it very likely that besides the five cardinal vowels of
Spanish & Brithenig, I would have had a high and a mid central vowel.
Whether the central vowels would be unrounded, as in north Wales, or
rounded; and if rounded, they may have become fronted as in French &
Breton; but I suspect they, in fact, would be rounded.
It is probable that the vowels would have been:
[Need monotype font to see this properly]

        Front              Central            Back
High    |i| = /i/        |u| = /ʉ/        |ou| = /u/

  Mid      |e| = /e/      |eu| = /ɵ/      |o| = /o/

    Low                   |a| = /a/

In view of the rich number of diphthongs in the earliest Old French
& in Old Welsh, there'd be quite a few of them about.

And I suspect the nasalized vowels of Old French (the modern have reduced
them
to just 4 among older speakers and 3 amongst the youngsters), Breton and
Old
Welsh would almost certainly have been there.

|y| BTW, if used at all, would've been [j], while |j| would be /dʒ/ from
Latin /j/ and /jj/.  But I better not get going on the consonants, or
I will be creating a parallel Brithening  :)

What I have mused upon several from time to time is what might have
happened
if Joan of Arc (or any one else) had not driven the English king out of
France,
i.e. if the King of England had held onto his French possessions and
eventually
established himself as King of France also.  I imagine the English nobility
would've maintained Norman French or Anglo-Norman, supported by their
francophone subjects and that this would've formed the basis of what became
in time the common language of the Anglo-Franch realms.  Obviously that
couldn't be part of IB
Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com    (home)
raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk   (work)
===============================================

Replies