Indo-European’s Celtic branch splits into three components: Continental (a group of mostly pre-literate languages spoken on the European continent from the second millennium B.C.E. on up past the Roman conquest), Goidelic and Brythonic. The latter, often called P-Celtic, was itself the language probably spoken by King Arthur during the sixth century. In time this split off into Cornish, Breton, Cumbric, Ivernic, Westcountry Brythonic (aka Old Devonian), Pictish (possibly) and Welsh. Until the mid-1500s Wales was exclusively Welsh-speaking. Today, about twenty percent of the population consider themselves fluent in the language, and about half of those (a quarter million or so) count it as their mother tongue. As recently as thirty years ago there were reported to be ten or twelve thousand who knew ONLY Welsh. Like all Celtic languages, Welsh uses mutations which are changes in the initial sounds of nouns somewhat similar in function to case endings. As an example, the name “Mary” is Mair, but “Church of Mary” translates to Llan Fair. Much is made of the supposed difficulty in pronouncing Welsh -- perhaps too much. The R is trilled slightly (as it is in 86% of languages that have Rs); all Cs and Gs are hard; F sounds like a V unless it’s doubled; and there are no Ks, Qs, Xs or Zs. There are also some non-English two-letter combos: Ll1 (which you’ve just seen above and also in names like Lloyd), Ch2, Dd3, Ph4 and Rh5. Another thing that makes Welsh look a bit intimidating is that the letter W often serves as a medial vowel, thus making the word Iwranws, below, sound out quite reasonably as yoo-RA-nus. |
