Re: reformed Welsh Spelling - comments?

On Friday, December 5, 2003, at 12:50 AM, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

> --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
[snip]

>>> Y = /V/? That's pretty bizarre!
>>
>> Bizarre or not, it's what the Welsh actually
>> do.
>>
>>> Isn't it /i/ in Welsh now?
>>
>> Nope!  Most of the time it's /V/.
>
> Well! You live and learn! Is this an /V/ that was
> once an /i/?
Nope - mostly unstressed vowels that have become shwa;
the Welsh like to spell them all the same way.

In early & middle Welsh stress was on the syllable final,
hence 'clear y' is found there.  When it shifted to the
penultimate in early modern Welsh the newly stressed 'obscure
y' became pronounced with a vowel that, to English ears, sounds
like the _u_ in southern English _but_, hence it is usually
denoted as /V/.

But Welsh English like, I understand, many varieties of US
English, do not distinguish [@] and [V].  They use a mid,
central unrounded vowel.

The 'clear y' is now indentical with Welsh |u|; the latter
began its life, so to speak, as [u] then shifted to a high
cental rounded [}] (IPA barred-u) - a vowel heard in present
day English of parts of Lowland scotland & Ulster - before
becoming unrounded [1].  There it has remained in the north,
but in the south it has advance to a high front position,
becoming identical with /i/.

The originally stressed mid central unrounded vowel coalesced
in middle Welsh, I believe, with the high central unrounded
[1] and then stayed that way in the north and moved, with |u|,
to the front in the south - hence the modern pronunciations of
'clear y'

[snip]

>> In the early days I tried to steer Andrew
>> towards a 'more continental'
>> orthography which would have made it look more
>> like Breton or the Kemmyn
>> variety of Cornish, but Andrew stuck with his
>> Welsh-like orthography.
>
> Well, that was rather the point! Welsh sound
> changes - Welsh orthography!
No, it wasn't.  It was to try and recreate what the Vulgar Latin
of Roman Britain might have become if the Saxons had not destroyed
the Romano-British urban culture before the language could take root.
I can assure you that no change was introduced unless it could be
justified.

I did correspond quite a bit with Andrew before he made Brithenig
known generally to the list. Andrew, in fact, had not given all the Welsh
hanges to Brithenig. He felt he could not, e.g. justify the spirant
mutation
in Brithenig.  I thought about this and found that, starting from a Romance
base, there were situations in which it could occur - it was adopted.

No, Andrew was not taking the simplistic line: let's take Vulgar Latin
and apply Welsh sound changes & Welsh spelling.  All changes were very
carefully thought through.  It was Andrew's thoroughness that I found most
attractive about Brithenig.

Andrew was as aware as I am that the same pronunciations can have different
spellings, c.f. the different versions of Breton or (middle) Cornish.
I argued that a British Romance woul've kept closer ties with the continent
and that its spelling would be more like modern version of Breton (which
is,
after all, descended from the old British language just as Welsh is).
Andrew
decided that the same sort of factors which led to some of the Welsh
spellings
would have still have operated in Britain.

In fact, of course, Brithening does not have Welsh orthograhy - the vowels
|u|
and |y| are given non-Welsh values.
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On Thursday, December 4, 2003, at 10:39 AM, michael poxon wrote:

> It must be reading all that Welsh that drove me crazy! For orthographic
> beauty in the Celtic langs, you can't beat Breton, a
I agree - which, I guess, is why I tried to persuade Andrew to go that way
  :)

Ray
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