I notice that on TfW trains the next station on the screen says for example:
ì Penybont.
I thought that there should be a soft mutation after ‘I’ so expected ì Benybont.
Which is correct please.
In this case, i Benybont would definitely be correct, but getting a screen to display that correctly is something that most firms ignore. It’s a solvable problem, but certainly not trivial.
Diolch. I’m happy that I was right to question it. I suppose the argument might be to ignore mutation to make Welsh place names more accessible to non- Welsh speakers. Other parts of the screen text do show correct mutations
Accessibility to non-Welsh speakers has no part in this, I suppose. I would venture that it’s ultimately boiling down to money, or the lack there-of. It’s a consequence of the software not being able to correctly handle mutations. It’s one thing if you have static texts that are written with the correct mutations “built-in”, but the station names are taken from an array with one entry per station, and that will invariably be the unmutated form. (To do it correctly you’d need to “code in” the different mutations and some way to tell the software which “version” to use in which scenario. That would make the software more expensive.)
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