read short): ā, bī, ec, ech, dī, edd, ē, ef, eff, eg, eng, āets, ī, el, ell, em, en, ō, pī, yff or ffī, er, es, tī, eth, ū, wˉ, ȳ. The names ha, he, hi given to the letter h by some writers on Welsh grammar and orthography[1] are figments. The name is āets, borrowed from Eng. or Fr. (Eng. aitch, Fr. ache, Span. atche):
- H. arall it sy—Harri
- Wyth yw 'r dyn a 'th eura di.—T.A., c. i 340.
'Thou hast another H.—Henry the Eighth is the man who will ennoble thee.' The first line is to be read Aets arall it sy Harri, as shown by the cynghanedd: t s r—t s r.
Lhuyd, (1707). used χ for ch, λ for ll, and ꝺ for dd. The last has survived in the form ẟ in ordinary handwriting, but manuscript ẟ is printed dd.
§ 8. The orthography of Mn. W. is almost purely phonetic: each letter of the alphabet has one standard sound, except y which has two. It will therefore be convenient to give the values of the letters in the modern alphabet, and then, rising the modern characters to represent the sounds of the language, to show in detail how each sound was written in earlier periods, noting any changes which have taken place in the sounds themselves.
The Vowels.
§ 9. The letters a, e, i, o, u, w, y represent vowel sounds. The following diagram shows the approximate relative positions of the vowels at the present day. ɥ and ỿ denote the two sounds of y. Vowels pronounced with rounded lips are enclosed in brackets. The more open the sound the less the rounding.
The vowel sounds i, e, a, o, w, except in certain diphthongal combinations, have probably undergone no material change from
- ↑ G.R., Rowland, Silvan Evans, Tegai. Rowland's haitch is a S.W. vulgarism.
