Re: reformed Welsh Spelling - comments?

On Saturday, December 6, 2003, at 12:45 PM, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> 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.
This is, indeed, very much the impression I have.  I think [X] is
more widespread in Europe than text books seem to indicate.

> 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_.
I'm it does vary, which is hardly surprising in view of how many
different countries have Spanish as their national language; that's
why I marked _Castilian_.

> WRT Welsh I for one would be happy if they introduced
> _þ_ and _ð_,
I don't think thorn ever made it into Wales - hardly surprising,
as it was taken from the Saxons' Runic alphabet.

[snip]
> digraphs.  I guess that _j_, _ç_ or even _k_ could be used
> for _ch_,
No - don't like any of them.

> but what could sensibly be used as a single-letter
> replacement for _ll_?
But the Welsh, like the Spanish, count _ll_ as a single
letter  :)

There isn't one.  It has been spelled as |lh| by some earlier
Welsh writers and modern Zulu & Xhosa spell it as |hl|.  I guess
if you really wanted a monographic(?) replacement, it would have to
something like barred-l.

> 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.
I'm aware only of a once common practice of writing lower case
Greek delta for |dd|.  But I came across one earlier Welsh text
that used delta for /D/ and |ç| (c-cedilla) for /T/ !

> Thus the Welsh seem happy with their orthography -- even the
> _u/y_ ambiguity which could easily be regularized away --,
Very true  :)

> and imposing a change in the interest of foreigners seems
> an unecessary idea!  Certainly a change in the direction of
> **English** seems absurd.
Agreed, on both points!

Ray
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