Re: reformed Welsh Spelling - comments?

On Friday, December 5, 2003, at 05:19 AM, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Christian Thalmann wrote:
>> Ones that would make it more readable to outsiders though.
>
> Except, why should that be a criterion?
Quite so.  I thought orthographies were meant the people that actually
spoke the language!  I guess some people think little nations must make
life easier for their more numerous neighbors.

> If you're going to learn Welsh,
> surely you shouldn't be put off by a few strange spellings,
Yep - to my simple mind the quibbles some people seem to be making about
Welsh apply equally well to, say, the Turkish use of |c| = /dZ/ and its
use of dotted & undotted i, or to some of the peculiarities of Pinyin etc.

I find it almost incredible that anglophones of all people are whinging
about
'oddities' in a near phonemic orthography.  It reminds me of saying of
Jesus
about the guy noticing a speck in his neighbor's eye and not the plank
stuck
in his own eye.

Yes, Welsh orthography ain't perfect; there are one or two speaks. Bur
compared
with that, English doesn't just have plank, it has a whole timber yard and
more!

Ray
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