Talk:Welsh alphabet

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[edit] W: an English or a Welsh letter?

All sources I've found seem to agree that the letter W started out as a V-V ligature, and was first used to write English (Anglo-Saxon), replacing the earlier Runic letter wynn. But Welsh also has an ancient literary tradition, and uses this letter extensively. I wonder how and when it was introduced into Welsh orthography. It would be an interesting matter to talk about in the article... FilipeS 17:29, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure. T. Arwyn Watkins ("Welsh" in Martin J. Ball (ed.) (1996/2002) The Celtic Languages. London/NY: Routledge: 289–348) writes that

the main evidence for written Welsh before the beginning of the ninth century is provided by Welsh 
place and personal names in the Latin transcriptions and manuscripts of Britain.  In recent years, 
these sparse sources have been used to good effect to argue that Welsh was already being written as  
early as the seventh century and possibly even the sixth ... The appearance of vernacular texts marks   
the beginning of the period known as Old Welsh (ninth to the twelfth centuries).  (290)

He gives the word gwac as one of his examples of Old Welsh, implying that the letter was in use then, although this was after it had started being used in Old English. The problem is that, as Wikipedia states, Old English scribed started using W in the seventh century, while Welsh literature from before that period only survives in later manuscript copies and, from what Watkins writes, it's not entirely clear that they aren't the first paper versions of oral traditions (though there were clearly people literate in Latin who could have written in Welsh). So it's not clear from the sound of it whether W entered the Welsh alphabet from English or was an independent invention. It seems too much of a coincidence that it should appear twice, independently, on the same island, so I suspect it did indeed spread from one language to the other. Who knows? Maybe it went into English from Welsh – writing VV twice to represent a long V seems a very reasonable thing to do, and that ligature would then have been a handy thing to borrow into English when scribes started getting annoyed that wynn looked too much like P. But that's just conjecture. garik 18:07, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Interesting, though I wonder if Mr. Watkins updated the spelling for his readers. My impression is that the triumph of "W" in English was not altogether free from Norman influences. There are also some continental languages that use the letter W, like German, but I have no idea when they adopted it. Polish and the Scandinavian languages (which used to use W) were clearly influenced by German. FilipeS 18:23, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I wondered that, though the letter was already in use in English by that time in any case, so he probably didn't update. It surprises me too that W should have been adopted into German from (one would have to assume) English, but there we are. garik 18:36, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

My understanding of the history of W is that it was coined in English, was sent over to the continent to write German (which at the time still used [w]) and Norman, was replaced by wynn, and then the Normans brought it back. It was not necessarily written in ligated form during all of this period. —Felix the Cassowary 14:24, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] i vs u vs y

The letters i, u and y are given the names î, û and ŷ. In a Southern dialect these are apparently all pronounced [iː], and in a Northern dialect only î is distinct (unless I misunderstand the relationship between the [iː~ɨː] and [ə] variants of y). So ... how do Well speakers say the differences if they're spelling a word or whatever? —Felix the Cassowary 14:24, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Y represents four different sounds (if you include long and short variants) in all dialects: /ɨ/, /ə/, /ɨ:/ and /əː/ in the north and /i/, /ə/, /iː/ and /əː/ in the south; but the last sound is used as the letter name. So the three letters i, u y are called [iː], [ɨː] and [əː] in the north, while in the south the first two are both [iː]. Sometimes u is called u bedol ("horseshoe u") to distinguish it from i. In fact, I've even heard a northerner call it that, quite unnecessarily. garik 16:08, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I've added this information to the article. —Felix the Cassowary 02:51, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NN in Welsh

Does Welsh have the digraph nn. 19:40, 5 January 2008 Homa Alona (Talk | contribs)