Re: Son of dZ (my 2p)

[Geoff Eddy <geoff@morven.compulink.co.uk>]

Hello,

Interesting debate this - it results, I think, from the tension between
a Celtic orthography and an Celticised Romance phonology. I've had
similar sorts of difficulties with Breathanach; I've had to alter the
phonology in places to avoid ending up with an orthography which doesn't
look Q-Celtic enough.

Anyway.

Raymond asked:

> Are Welsh 'garej', 'sosej' etc hideous?

To my eyes, sort of; I'm not used to final -j except in Slavic, and I'd
certainly agree that:

> [...] the overuse of final -j in
> Esperanto does give that language a perculiar inelegance  ;)

He also said that:

> But, as Andrew probably recalls (maybe in emails we exchanged before the
> list got extended :) , I've never been keen on the use of {f} = /v/ and
> {ff} = /f/ in Brithening.  Both Breton & Cornish use {v} and {f}
> respectively for the two sounds and, indeed, in medieval Welsh some scribes
> followed the post-Norman practice and used {v} = /v/ and {f} = /f/ also.

Personally, I think Brithenig is fine as is; Welsh orthography is rather
appealing in its quirky way, and Brithenig retains this.

> Yes, Romance usage has both {ll} and {lh} as "modification of l" - tho the
> modification is palatalization and not fricativization :)   Following
> Spanish use of {ll} and {nn} (the latter now written with one n on top as
> the tilde) to denote palatalizations, Basque has {tt} and {dd} to denote
> patalized 't' and 'd' so there is some precedence for {dd}.  In any case, I
> think that either {dd} or {dh} are likely to have been used by Romance
> scribes (unless they borrowed Old English edh ;)

Much of these spellings result, of course, from the inability of the
Roman alphabet to keep up with the sound-changes in the descendent
languages. Trying to adapt the alphabet to a non-Latin phonology is a
task unto itself, and reconciling someone else's decisions with the
phonology of one's own language is what this is all about :-)

Geoff

P.S. Does anyone know enough Latin to translate the quote in my
signature?

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