Re: USAGE: Yet another few questions about Welsh.

On Friday, July 9, 2004, at 09:08 , Joe wrote:

> 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).
Yes, I did know that    :)
But it's worth pointing out.

But you're right, it wasn't phonemic in OE; both [v] and [f] were
allophones pf the phoneme normally denoted /f/.  Similarly, [s] and [z]
were allophones of /s/, and [T] and [D] were allophones of /T/. It was the
influx of new vocab from Norman-French that changed things and gave
English /v/ and /z/ as new phonemes.

> Do you know if Welsh held that up for too long?  Or did it
> never adopt it?
Welsh never had it. The old Brittonic language had only one fricative, /s/
. [v] arose first as allophones of /b/ and /m/ (in the latter case,
accompanied with nasalization); Eventually, as the Brittonic langs
developed, /v/ acquired independent status as a phoneme.  /f/ was rather
different; it developed partly as an allophone of /p/ in certain
environments, but was aided also by borrowing from late Latin with /f/.
But, yes, [f] and [v] were never allophones of the same phoneme in the
older forms of the Brittonic langs.

What we have is a people A for whom /f/ and /v/ are different phonemes
side by side with people B for whom [f] and [v] are allophones of the same
phoneme. The latter people spell both sounds as |f|. But, because of the
phonology of their language, the single |f| tends to represent the voiced
[v], while |ff| was always voiceless (strictly /ff/, tho people A may well
'hear' it as [f]). So people A adopt, for their two distinct phonemes, |f|
  = /v/ and |ff| = /f/.

Now, when the Normans took over and reformed (or deformed) our spelling,
you do find names like Alfred being written as Alvred (yes, the |f| was
voiced here in OE). The only trouble is that it wasn't till centuries
later that 'u' and 'v' were distinguished as separate letters. So the poor
old Alfred was likely to get his name misread as 'Alured'.

The letter 'v' (i.e. the same as 'u') was used by some in medieval Welsh
to denote /v/. I don't know whether the 'Alured' type of problem was more
prevalent when Welsh was written this way than it proved to be in English.
  But whatever the reason, the older |ff| and |f| prevailed.

Welsh was given a standard orthography way back in the Tudor period thanks
to Elizabeth I's having the Bible & the Anglican 'Book of Common Prayer'
translated into Welsh. Not that she had any feeling for the Welsh language
- she wanted to keep them on board and accept her Anglican settlement and
not stick with the old religion like the Irish were.

The orthographies of Breton & Cornish, however, are much more recent
developments; both were influenced to some extent by the dominant L1 of
their neighbors and both were developed well after the establishment of 'u'
  and 'v' as separate letters. The orthographies of Breton go back to the
19th cent, and those of Cornish were developed during the revival in the
last century.

Ray
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