Re: reformed Welsh Spelling - comments?

On Friday, December 5, 2003, at 08:59 PM, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

> --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>
>>> Well, that was rather the point! Welsh sound
>>> changes - Welsh orthography!
>>
>> No, it wasn't.  [...]
>>
>> No, Andrew was not taking the simplistic line:
>> let's take Vulgar Latin
>> and apply Welsh sound changes & Welsh spelling.
[snip]

> I never said it wasn't thorough; and I never said
> it was simplistic. I may exagerate some,
Yep  :)

> but the
> fact remains that he applied similar sound
> changes that happened in Welsh and there is quite
> an obvious Welsh influence (too much, I think,
> but that's neither here nor there) on the
> spelling.
It seems as though we might both agree about Andrew's
use of |ff| and |f|.

But it's certainly not Welsh orthography. In fact, as
I guess you know, it's a mainly of Romance & Welsh. The
vowels are wholly Romance (none of the Welsh |u| and
|y| business here); even the |w| is not significantly
Welsh.  The letter was introduced to England & Wales
by Norman scribes, replacing - in the case of English -
the Old English letter wynn (not a bad thing IMO as wynn
was far too similar to thorn and p in shape).

Besides the Welsh use of |ff| and |f|, Brithenig has
only |ll|, |dd| and |rh|.  As none of these sounds
occur in any extant Romancelang, he has no Romance
models to go on.  One could argue for |lh| and |dh|
instead of the double letters; but it seems a small point.

The use of hard & soft |c| and |g| a la Romance is, of course,
most distinctly non-Welsh both as regards phonology and as
regards orthography. And, perhaps oddly, the use of |k| for
/k/ before front vowels is both non-(modern)Welsh and non-
Romance. But, of course, it was common enough in middle Welsh.

I notice Brithenig's |ch| is not the Welsh use but, with its
ach-laut and ich-laut variants, is exactly like modern German!
(The Normans adopted the spelling |gh| for the same pair of
allophones in Old & Middle English.)

Ah well, I suspect neither you nor I would've done things quite
the same way; and as it's Andrew creation, he has quite rightly
has the last say.

Ray
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