Musings on the Welsh Alphabet

 

I may have figured out why I like French so much. Back when the Normans conquered England, they foisted their syntax onto the Anglo-Saxons, so we're just speaking French with English words. You just have to know the equivalent vocabulary, and you plug it right into the sentence in the same place. Unlike Irish, which has the most bizarre syntax I've ever seen, and I studied Basque. Then today I saw someone recite the Welsh alphabet, and that sent me down the rabbit hole of finding videos about their alphabet. They do teach Welsh on DuoLingo, unlike, say, Basque. Time to get on that, DuoLingo!! And really, you have to do something about your substandard Irish lessons. That's another reason I prefer French - not only is it easier, but there are cheesy stories to read. How hard would it be to create cheesy stories in Irish? I feel like a kid: two lessons in Irish (eat your vegetables), and then you can go play around in French, which really is like eating potato chips or something, because I just can't stop. 

Now that I'm an expert (hah!) on the Welsh alphabet, Rich was asking me if the Latin alphabet works for it, and then he remembered that it doesn't even work that well for English. Here's what I've got so far: CH is like the same as in German, you know, like the last sound in "Bach." DD is a voiced th sound, like the first sound of "the." TH, however, is an unvoiced th like the first sound of "thing." F is a v sound, but FF is an f sound. And best of all, LL is this sound where you put your tongue in position to say L, but you say S instead. So the word "llanfair" doesn't sound like "lawn fair" but like "chlan vire." That word apparently means "floodplain," in case you were wondering. It's in the name of like every Welsh village, and it's also a hymn tune name. But I've bored my gentle readers enough with my linguistics obsession, so no need to bore you all with my hymn tune names obsession.

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