Ray Brown wrote:
>
>> and something analogous to the VL geminate step happened
>> with the fricatives, hence <ff>=/f:/=>/f/ (while <f>=/f/=>/v/). Right?
>
>
> No - pure spelling convention. Welsh adopted the Old English |f| with
> its
> pronunciation [v] (still preserved to this day in 'of') and |ff| with the
> pronunciation [f] (still preserved to this day in 'off'). But this has
> not always been so. In medieval Welsh some writers did follow Norman &
> continental practice and use |v| and |f| as /v/ and /f/. But the more
> traditional |f| and |ff| had prevailed.
>
I'd just like to point out here that OE <f> only represented [v] between
vowels and voiced sounds(otherwise it was [f], and I don't that it was
phonemic). Do you know if Welsh held that up for too long? Or did it
never adopt it?
>