Re: Phonological Oddity

["Raymond A. Brown" <raybrown@clara.co.uk>]

At 11:34 pm +1200 4/8/99, andrew wrote:
>On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
>Bengwenid aeredr, badrun!  Ysper ke 'w h-afeth yn bon demp in Nghemr.
>Sa's bon uddir di 'w anghor.  Gw h-ereth missad.

It was fine in Wales if one likes DIY :)
Hanging doors & doing a few other jobs around my son's house, relieved from
time to time by the grandchildren.

To show how mad we are, we've brought our two grandsons (3 & 5) back with
us to give their parents a rest!!   We have them for a couple of weeks
before their parents rescue us and take them to see their other grandmother
in France.  It means that tho I'm back on-line, I don't have much chance to
keep up with emails. I don't thonk I'll be back on Conlang for a while.

[snip]
>
>Description of medial nasal mutation taken under advisement and added to
>the list of things to after the latest lexicon upgrade.  (must get back to
>that)
>
>> Final -nt is, however, preserved, e.g.
>
>so presumably canhar but ys cant...

I guess so.

>
>> I guess learned influence in the case of borrowings.
>>
>It got borrowed back into the language then.

A bit like the remodelling of Middle English 'olifaunt' as 'elephant' I
suppose.

>On another note, I am wondering whether to create a distinction between
>'in' and '(d')intr' to parallel that which exists in Welsh between 'yn'
>and 'mewn'

Umm - the Celtic languages do all have a different word for 'in' depending
upon whether the following noun is definite or not (the two words are
related in Gaelic, however); but this developed I think because at some
stage the definite article was too similar to 'yn' (or the equivalent
inherited word).  It seems that in earlier Welsh the article varied between
'yn' & 'yr' (rather like Breton 'an', 'ar', 'al' [don't know if Welsh ever
had 'yl']); so, I guess, having 'yn'  before an indefinite noun kind of
felt awkward.

Personally, I'd nor recommend imitating a Welshism simply because it is a
Welshism.  IMO there must be convincing reason(s) why a development should
take place in this Celticized Romance tongue.  I don't think 'in' would be
confused with the definte article.

The French use of 'en' and 'dans' may seem vaguely parallel.  But the
trouble with French was that 'en le' contracted to 'eu' [ew] and got
confused with 'au' [aw] <-- a le.  The result was that à extended its range
of use and 'dans' also took over from 'en' in many cases.  In modern French
'en' is used before definite place names with the article e.g. en Bretagne
and in certain set phrases.  But 'en' and 'dans' do *not* correspond to
Welsh 'yn' and 'mewn'; 'dans' is used before _definite_ nouns (dans la mer)
as much as before indefinite.  And the other western Romance did not have
this problem.

Ray.