• davidagain@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Rhowch, cwtch, mwyn have to be Welsh. Classicly Welsh sounding words, and mbrsrtowcs, strxfrm can’t possibly be Welsh. Source: my welsh uncle taught me to pronounce Welsh place names.

    Wcstold, wcsoll wmffre could be either but sound really weird as Welsh to me.

      • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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        3 months ago

        I love the Welsh, but holy shit that’s not what those letters are supposed to be for. They and the Irish just made a bunch of shit up when they started to standardize spelling. It makes me understand how Russians feel when Westerners use Cyrillic letters improperly.

        • cartoon meme dog@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          the letters are “supposed to be” for Latin, a language with only five different vowel sounds.

          everyone since has just been making a bunch of shit up.

          • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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            3 months ago

            I get that, and i also understand that English shifted it’s vowels compared to similar languages. But aside from French, my American brain can kinda figure out how to pronounce Germanic and Romance languages, whereas languages such as Welsh and Polish seems to have applied completely different rules to the Latin alphabet than everyone else.

            • shneancy@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              at least welsh and polish actually read the letters that we write down, unlike some languages

            • lad
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              3 months ago

              So, you’ve got no issues with “g” being sometimes kinda “h”, “j” being same kind of “h” always, “h” not being a sound a all, “d” sounding like “th”, and “z” sounding like “th” but another “th”, not the one for “d”. Oh, and “c” sounding either like “k” or like the latter “th”

              I know some people that claim that everyone should use Latin alphabet, because you then know what things sound like, but that is the most bullshit take I ever heard. I guess that knowing how to write letters helps, but it looks like every other language pronounces those letters different, and English makes extra effort to pronounce different even the same things

          • Serpent@feddit.uk
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            3 months ago

            It’s easy. W is a vowel in Welsh. It sounds similar to ö in German and it can be modified as ŵ to elongate the sound such as in the word dŵr which means water.

            Wrwgwai or Wcrain (for example) are the natural way to spell those countries using the Welsh alphabet. Its a highly phonetic language believe it or not.

                • lad
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                  3 months ago

                  Afaik, comes from Latin that had no “U” and “V” was both vowel and consonant until some point in time.

            • Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works
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              3 months ago

              Yeah, I’m Welsh myself. I just wondered how somebody who struggled with Wmffre / Humphrey would do with the whole Wrwgwai thing. Some English speakers get it immediately others get a headache thinking about it.