Plan B Forum

We're NOT dominated by sheep, it DOESN'T rain all the time, and we DON'T prance round in stovepipe hats all the time

The Weather Doesn't Always Suck, We Don't Always Dress Oddly, And The Rumors Of Bestiality Are Grossly Exaggerated..."*

Firstly then, we consider the seeming lack of Welsh vowels. In a simplified, non-linguistic analysis, we can inform our English colleague that all his ‘vowels’ are present in Welsh plus w and y. Further, all such vowels can take the circumflex accent (^) lengthening their sound, and the diaresis (¨) enabling them to retain its ‘pure monothong sound’ when preceding another vowel. Again, like English, two or three Welsh vowels can sit side by side causing a diphthong or triphong – such as in cae 'a field' or tywyllwch 'darkness'. To the uninitiated, the latter word looks bereft of any vowel; to a Welsh speaker, the vowels actually outnumber the consonants in the word: y, w, y and w as against t, ll and ch.

Again, to our non-linguist, words such as fly, sly, cry, spry etc have no vowels at all in English – and although the sound is recognised as being vocalic [ai], it is the linguist who will tell you so; the uneducated, upon seeing the written word would conclude that as none of the ‘usual suspects’ of letters/vowels have been provided, then no vowels are present in these words. Alas for the dearth of vowels in English …

This seeming lack of vowels then leads to other false analyses of a whole string of consonants – consonantal clusters as we linguists call them – in Welsh, whereas in fact there are regular syllables with vowels at their nuclei. One has heard of similar accusations being made against Polish and the Balkan languages, all based on the misconception of assuming these languages’ alphabets are identical to the more familiar English one. Yet, and in addition, English too, is a prime candidate for consonantal clusters – something which Far Eastern speakers of Chinese and Japanese often struggle with. Let us consider these words, lacking as they are in vowels to break up an almost unpronounceable string of consonants: schedule, strict, spring, splat, pitch, crash. (This last has the added difficulty for the Japanese in trying to distinguish it from clash). And how about the daddy of consonantal clusters for English according to the Guinness Book of Records – latchstring – with a total of six consecutive consonants?

Gob wrote:Welsh has 7 vowels, English has a paucity of them.

Welsh 101