Re: reformed Welsh Spelling [to: Ray Brown]

Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> At 00:32 5.12.2003, Stephen Mulraney wrote:
>
>> Anyway, to paraphrase your
>> comment about the Welsh letter |w|, hell will freeze over before you
>> persuade the
>> Goidelics to abandon their use of |aidheagh| as a vowel. Some of usrather
>> like it:)
>
>
> And how is it pronounced? [Ai]?
Actually, I'd have to see an actual word with that sequence in it to be sure,
and I can't think of any right now. But here's a similar one: The Irish name
for (the County) Louth is _Lú_ [lu:], but it used to be spelt somewhat more
lengthily as _Lughaidh_, so that we have |ughaidh| for [u:] :). The more
extreme cases of this in Irish have been reformed away (as with this example),
but Scottish Gaelic has never undergone this particular orthographic
impoverishment :).

At one stage the |dh|'s and |gh|'s were pronounced as [D] and [G], but they've
since fallen together and have often become semivowels (the exact way in which
they're currently expressed depends on the dialect); However, long sequences of
semivowels separated by vowels send to fade away after lengthening the first vowel.
--
Stephen Mulraney  ataltane@ataltane.net  http://livejournal.com/~ataltane
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he
hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, how-
ever measured or far away.                        --  Henry David Thoreau