Re: reformed Welsh Spelling - comments?

--- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

> It seems as though we might both agree about
> Andrew's use of |ff| and |f|.
That's certainly one example. Dd, ll and rh are
the others. They're enough to give it a Welsh
feel and to make people think that B is,
actually, Welsh; and people have made that
mistake on more than one occasion.

> But it's certainly not Welsh orthography. In
> fact, as
> I guess you know, it's a mainly of Romance &
> Welsh.
Yes, I kind of suspected the language is Romance!
;)

> The
> vowels are wholly Romance (none of the Welsh
> |u| and |y| business here);
Thank heavens for that! I'd get the Y wrong for
sure!

> 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.
Which leads me to wonder if such would really
survive into a Romance language. But that's water
over the dam, now. Not complaining, mind! Kerno
has its share of unlikely stuff.

> 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.
Agreed.

> And, perhaps oddly, the use of |k| for
> /k/ before front vowels is both
> non-(modern)Welsh and non-Romance.
Common enough in, for ex., Spanish spelling
reform schemes.

> But, of course, it was common enough
> in middle Welsh.
And in older forms of Spanish and appears in Old
French. I suspect it's from MW that Andrew got it
from. K in older Romance doesn't seem to be
firmly established - and of course, none of the
main Romance languages kept it around.

> Ah well, I suspect neither you nor I would've
> done things quite the same way;
Certainly not! ;) Well, you can see what I did
with the thing, anyway. I had no intention of
following the historical Cornish paradigm in any
way; only mimicking and expanding on what I found
to be interesting in Cornish development. I did
and still do follow some Cornish orthographical
considerations. Enough that people
(nonconlangers) unfamiliar with K think it's
either Cornish or French. Thus far, one person
has pinned it down to being a relative of
Brithenig. The nearness of the charge was
surprising, since I don't consider the two to be
especially closely related, and they don't look
much alike.

Curious though: what might you have done, had you
decided to take on this project? Naturally, your
familiarity with both Latin and Welsh would be of
great advantage.

Padraic.


=====
la cieurgeourea provoer mal trasfu ast meiyoer ke 'l andrext ben trasfu.


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