Letter "K" in pre-16th century Welsh

SMBC published this comic today, which I found interesting. Not something I’d ever heard before.

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Interesting. Supposing that William Morgan had got in first (he almost did), would the history of the Welsh alphabet have been different?

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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?

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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!

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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 :disappointed: - I just got this from a copy of the Proceedings) :


… with apologies pawb for not providing an English translation :frowning:

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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 :sob:

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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!

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But surely that’s only the first step - why don’t we change the alphabet completely? :wink: I’m sure I saw an attempt at that once … or was it Esperanto? :rofl:

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Let’s go for it!

I vote Cyrillic… :slight_smile:

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I rather fancy Georgian myself :slight_smile:

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Tengwar. Or possibly Teñouar.

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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

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Bengali’s excellent. And so is Klingon.

:thinking::joy:

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Otlichnaya ideya.

Ya soglasen s vami :slight_smile:

I truly await further ideas from you. :+1:

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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? :wink:

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It may not necessarily have been invented by Iolo as it has certain similarities with early Celtic and Italic alphabets such as Lepontic.