SMBC published this comic today, which I found interesting. Not something I’d ever heard before.
Interesting. Supposing that William Morgan had got in first (he almost did), would the history of the Welsh alphabet have been different?
I’ve heard somewhere that Patagonian Welsh commonly uses v for f, on the grounds of Spanish-language printers not having enough f’s for f and ff all over the place. I can’t swear to it, though – @johnwilliams_6 did I get that from you?
Having been to Welsh Patagonia recently, I didn’t notice any v’s around where there would normally be f’s - in fact, the area refers to itself as ‘Y Wladfa’ (with an ‘f’). I can have a look back through some photos of things in Welsh there and post back if I find any v’s though!
I’ve come across a couple of place-names via Wikipedia, but would be happy to know more, or be corrected:
Yes, probably @RichardBuck - took me a while to track down where I heard this but one, at least, of the sources was this, which is an extract of work presented at a 2008 conference in Trevelin (Los Galesas en la Patagonia IV: Ein Breiniad (1878-1883): ¿Mero precursor de Y Drafod?)(sadly, I wasn’t at the conference - I just got this from a copy of the Proceedings) :
… with apologies pawb for not providing an English translation
Very interesting! I had some casual work once where I had to read some old text scanned in digitially and confirm whether it was actually Welsh or not, and type in a confirmation of the wording. Quite a lot used 'v’s and 'k’s and it was only by reading it aloud I could work out whether some of it was Welsh. I LOVED that project, but unfortunately it was only short
I think we should go back to v for f and k for c - it would make Welsh look more like Breton, which would be totally cool, surely? And I’d be VERY tempted to go a few steps further and use z for dd, c’h for ch and ou for w.
Ve vyzai paoub yn kytuno vod hyn yn zizorol iaoun i vyvyrouyr a c’hymry kymaeg vel ei gilyz, on’ byzen?
Let’s start a campaign. Let’s get up a petition!
But surely that’s only the first step - why don’t we change the alphabet completely? I’m sure I saw an attempt at that once … or was it Esperanto?
Let’s go for it!
I vote Cyrillic…
I rather fancy Georgian myself
Tengwar. Or possibly Teñouar.
The one Iolo Morgannwg made up was really novel - can’t remember what it was called, but I vote for that one.
edit: here it is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelbren_y_Beirdd
Bengali’s excellent. And so is Klingon.
Otlichnaya ideya.
Ya soglasen s vami
I truly await further ideas from you.
There are plenty of Ks and Vs in the English versions of Welsh language place-names and and in actual conversations some “Celt-” words get pronounces “Sselt-”.
On the other hand, there are also loads of arbitrary English language grammar rules that have held sway for hundreds of years. What an earth up to were they?
It may not necessarily have been invented by Iolo as it has certain similarities with early Celtic and Italic alphabets such as Lepontic.