Cambrophilia and Taalen mutations

Heb yr Aidan:

> >No Welsh here at MSU :-( Yeah, I _have_ started Mod. Irish, and I'll
> >possibly be taking Old Irish next semester and Breton next year...
>
>     Oooh, Old Irish. The most beautiful, and the most
> difficult, lang I have ever studied!
Yeah, I have recently got enamoured by the preverb system... I guess my
next conlang will be all-preverb.

> >Though, I have very firmly articulated my desire to have
> Welsh, so one
> >of the teachers promised to arrage a meeting with one of the faculty
> >members (who doesn't teach, sadly) so that we could set up a small MW
> >reading class *anxious for that*
>
>      Well, since you've got Modern Welsh, Middle Welsh
> shouldn't be that hard.
Well, depends on what you call 'having' Modern Welsh :-)

The trouble with Welsh is that most of the research is published *in*
Welsh, which makes much of the literature pretty inaccessible in the
beginning - hey no academic grammar of literary Welsh in English in
print since Morris Jones! :-(

> I've only had a semester of Modern, and Middle is close
> enough that
> I'm not having any problems at all. We're using Ford's
> edition (since Ford
> is teaching it!) of the Math fab Mathonwy branch of the Mabinogi (4th
> branch, I think). Between that (and Ford's glossary), and
> Evans' Grammar ofa
> Middle Welsh, it's easy. I can get you copy of Evans, if
> you need it.
> $20. should cover the book and the shipping, I think.
Wohoo, I at least have half of that list. I was lucky enough to locate a
copy of Simon Evans in Oxford! :-)

Ironically enough, I have literature on only Old (Falileyev) and Middle
(Simon Evans) Welsh at home, but the variety I know the best is Modern
:)

Anyway, as far as I'm aware, the standard MW reading text (unless your
teacher is an authority with a pet text) is the beginning of Pwyll,
which can be found on the 'net.

[...]
> >Was that only initially, or word-medially too? If it was the latter,
> >then wow, the Taalen speakers _are_ Ñoldor! :-)
>
>     To be honest, I'm not sure. I have to get more vocab
> figured out before
> I'll know. I _think_ that they _are_ Noldor, in that sense, though!
Cool. Are they human anyway?

> > >      Hmm... I don't know how to make this unrounded [w], so
> > > that's a strike against it.
> >
> >Try a _heavily_ velarized [l] until it is an approximant. I
> think I have
> >heard in some pronunciations of 'cold'. I also stand by my
> opinion that
> >is the sound of the Polish crossed _l_
>
>    Ah! I believe that's the "dark l"...which is not a
> distinctive sound in Taalen, so it would still just be [l].
Well, I was actually talking of an [l] *so* dark it isn't [l] anymore.

>     Well, I've already got a very rich system of vowel change
> ("slender"
> vowels like /a/ becoming "wide" vowels like upturned c (can't
> remember the
> XSAMPA),
So <a> is the Swedish short [a] here? Otherwise I don't see it is a
front vowel (which is my understanding of slender).

> diphthongs are frequent thanks to i-affection, and
> so on) , so
> even the one more would make it a language of vowels
> entirely. I'd have to
> get imports of consonants from Serbia to finish the lang! :)
Why not from the Caucasus, then? :-)

[...]
> > >    On the other hand, the Noldo in me likes the l>n change
> > > too, but I think
> > > levelling would return it to [l] or remove the [l]
> > > altogether.
> > > For example,
> > > _emeth_ 'shrine' < nemeton, where the [n-] was interpreted as
> > > part of the article (i, in before vowels).
> >
> >Do you mean that this _nn_ could be reinterpreted as part of the
> >article?
>
>     Yes, that, or that the word, orginally in _l-_, would be
> reinterpreted
> as _n-_. That a word like _lonn_ 'homeland' would become
> _onn_ or _nonn_,
> and if this process continued (likely), eventually there
> would be no words which began in _l_.
There is a similar idea in Tolkien's Gnomish Lexicon. Well, the idea is
pretty general (you find it in Etym and later), but an explanation is
given in GL. It's about the g- prefixion to liquids. It became a
productive derivation means precisely because the lenited forms of gl-
and gr-initial words coincided with the l- and r-initial words after the
article, and the latter could become re-interpreted as being the former.

Pavel
--
Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru

Is mall a mharcaicheas am fear a bheachdaicheas
                 --Scottish proverb