This Week in Welsh
I am taking a break this week from discussing my new Welsh knowledge (which, by the way, is considerable. We learned a new aspect) to dispell a myth. There is a pernicious rumor out there that when the English conquered the whole island their first order of business was the plunder the Welsh language and steal its vowels. This is a misunderstanding that comes from words such as nhw, which means "they" and cynnwys which I believe means "include" and bwyd which I know means "food".
I speculate that this rumor is actually borne of a misunderstanding that native English speakers have of our own language. This is where I will begin. We represent our vowels with five graphemes, that is, five letters, that is A, E, I, O, U. However, we have more vowels. So many more vowels. The letter O can be said in "on" or like "hone". It can be reduced to an almost I like sound as in "Thorough". If you're reading this, you get it, because its something every literate learner has had to deal with. South English Standard Pronunciation, or RP (what English people speak), has 19 vowels in it. The dialect I speak has about 14 vowels. Yes, I admit, "merry", "Mary" and "marry" all sound the same coming out of my mouth.
Cymraeg uses the letters A, E, I, O, U and they do represent vowel sounds. It also uses W,Y to represent vowels. In addition to this, long and short vowels can form what are known as "minimal pairs". This means that the difference between two words can come down to vowel length. This is cool if your a nerd like me. Its irritating if you're a language learner. What you should get from this is Welsh is a vowel-rific language.
