Re: reformed Welsh Spelling - comments?

At 21:15 5.12.2003, Ray Brown wrote:

>I have spent a lot of time today trying to check out (no pun intended) the
>exact
>pronunciation in these languages, but even searching on Google produced
>confused
>results (I did discover that the _Castilian_ pronunciation of its |j| is
>[X] -
>tho texts books again generally say "like ch in Scots _loch_"   :)
If I have understood things right, which I may well not have,
most languages that don't have a palatal [C] -- velar [x]
kind of variation, as we find it in German and modern Greek,
do have [X] rather than [x].  It seems rather common that
[x] shifts to [X] in order to counteract a tendency to
palatalization.  Some dialects of Spanish (e.g. Chilean) do
have palatalization of _j_.  I wonder if these have [x]
rather than [X] for the 'hard' _j_.

WRT Welsh I for one would be happy if they introduced
_þ_ and _ð_, made a distinction between _f_ and _v_
similar to other languages and replaced some _y_ by _u_,
since that would make the orthography even more phonemic,
but that rises the question of how to handle the remaining
digraphs.  I guess that _j_, _ç_ or even _k_ could be used
for _ch_, but what could sensibly be used as a single-letter
replacement for _ll_?  However this is ultimately up to
the Welsh speakers/writers to decide, and although some of them
have been using e.g. _dh_ and _lh_ or even Greek letters in
place of the present digraphs it has not caught on.
Thus the Welsh seem happy with their orthography -- even the
_u/y_ ambiguity which could easily be regularized away --,
and imposing a change in the interest of foreigners seems
an unecessary idea!  Certainly a change in the direction of
**English** seems absurd.  Similarly a few Swedes seem taken
in by the Anglophone habit of simply ignoring our diacritics
-- witness the way Swedish is mangled in URLs and email addresses --
but the majority of us see _å ä ö_ rightly as necessary letters
in their own right, or simply as the way it is.



/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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