Regarding the word newydd being spelled differently on the same page, it looks like the typesetter only used newyð because it made that line of text the perfect length.
The mixed use of ð and dd in Salisbury's Bible is not surprising if you've ever seen the Gutenberg Bible. Typographers of incunabula (early books) aimed to emulate the mannerisms of blackletter scribes, and that often included a) variants of letters to avoid the "repetitive" look of perfectly-uniform print that we now take for granted, and b) using sigla and contractions, often inconsistently; this was seen as more naturalistic. In total the Gutenberg type had 290 different glyphs, far more than any Italian or modern typeface would use for Latin. One of the benefits of this was ensuring there was no ragged right edge and that every line was fully packed; note that in your first example, the typographer readily put hyphenation in words that only had one letter on the line, like "yddo" near the bottom, which would be a faux pas in modern convention (we generally try to respect syllable breaks.) By putting ð instead of dd, they were able to avoid cutting "di" in half, or, more likely, bumping it down a line, as @annayosh noted.
Just want to agree with everyone else. This is a great channel! You present unique topics in an informative but humorous way. They are a joy to watch. Diolch yn fawr!
Right when I decide to start learning a rare language, Welsh, I find your channel. Amazing. This is a sign. I hope you post more linguistics! Maybe basic Welsh grammar hahahaha
Hello again everyone, I apologise there being such a long wait time between this video and the last one. Full disclosure, there should have been a video last week, but after 3 weeks of making it I realised that it had essentially fallen apart, I wasn’t happy with it and I didn’t want to upload it. I will revisit and complete that video eventually, but I thought I’d try and make a shorter one for you guys in the meantime. It was disheartening to spend almost all of my free time on a project only to have it be very terrible, but I’m happy with this video, and I’m really happy with how my channel has been growing! I’m eternally grateful to everyone who subscribed, I’ll be making a few shorter videos (like this one) that should hopefully only take 1-2 weeks to make, I hope you enjoy!
I don’t often subscribe to anybody but you really deserve mine at least, hopefully you’ll get many more for your truly interesting video and also for not begging me to subscribe which I really hate , so a thumbs up and a sub off me !!! Well done truly informative video !!! Diolch yn fawr iawn neu diolch yn dew fatha fusa nain yn ddeud !!! Peace out from the police state of north Wales 🏴
I would like to see a video about Welsh folklore/ bedtime stories and even traditions and superstitions (separately of course) . I am curious about how they match with the ones from my country.
I would definitely love to do another video on Welsh mythology/superstitions etc, I’ve only ever made one but I’ve always had plans for more, I’ve just never gotten around to it! (Hence why there’s a Welsh mythology playlist with only one video in it)
I'm studying in Bangor for my uni degree at the moment, and I love watching your videos to learn more about the history of the country! Keep up the great work!
Hi again. I’m still watching all of your videos and that joke about your grandma seeing the devil himself was great. You’re absolutely hilarious great job.
Now this is the kind of content I like to see! Niche historical information presented in a non boring paper style, especially about orthography & language in general.
English had the same problem with printing and it lost various letters as well, including thorn which provides a 'th' sound. Printers tended to replace it with a 'y' which leads to the misunderstanding that 'ye' (as in ye olde...) is the singular of 'you' whereas it is of course 'the'. You can tell eth was lost in English from words like clothe. The other printing one is the letter yogh which got replaced with a 'z' and that is why Menzies should be pronounced as if it's a gh in the middle not a z....
That's not terribly helpful, given that 'gh' in modern English, while sometimes pronounced 'f' as in 'rough' or 'cough' is also often silent as in 'through', 'bough', or 'thought' . If I'm not mistaken, in Old English it was more consistently pronounced rather like modern German 'ch' or the Scots 'ch' in 'loch'.
@@davidbouvier8895 . I don't understand your reply. I was pointing out that various letters have been lost, primarily caused by the introduction of printing. The loss of the letters leads to pronunciation changes and the loss of some distinction in pronunciation. Whilst the loss of the long 'S' isn't really an issue, problems have been caused with understanding pronunciation with the loss of letters that had specific pronunciations. Thorn is the most obvious one as printers replaced it with a 'y' as a substitute, which readers in the C16th understood but is not now understood by most people. The character yogh impacts on pronunciation of Scottish names like Menzies for example where what is now a 'z' was the character yogh. Language is complex and unless someone invents a time machine, we'll probably never really understand how or why it's evolved.
@@davidbouvier8895yogh looked like Ȝ ȝ, which is very close to a handwritten z of the time, so in many cases it was just replaced with a z. For some examples "niȝt" would be pronounced "night" and "yȝe" would be pronounced "eye" And the common form of the þ during middle english looked very similar to y, creating "ye olde" instead of "þe old" English even had informal and formal pronouns with þou and þe/you But yes, modern english has no real system, lots of different dialects, pronunciations and languages coming together creating some wild mess.
Your doing pretty well, got nice editing, a good mic, pleaseant voice and a neat subject you cover. with time I'm certain you'll grow big. Can't wait for your next video on Welsh History
0:51 The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (ɬ in the IPA, ll in Welsh) is actually a very common sound specifically among American Indian languages, occurring in languages from Greelandic to Chickasaw to Navajo to the mention Nahuatl (even occurring in the name of Nahuatl)
im warm springs and yakama from the pacific northwest and in my language: ichishkíin, we have the double l sound. since english is my first language trying to say ł to speak my indigenous languge is difficult. i didn't know that sound is in welsh also. it's so cool to learn that :)
the Middle-Welsh V definitely reminds me of the way i've seen some Roman cursive write their letter u/v/w !! just discovered the channel and loving it so far, awesome job ❤
One thing I've always been curious about in Welsh Orthography is why /f/ is written , With a single instead representing the /v/ sound, As far as I can tell was used for /v/ in some older Welsh documents, As was as you mentioned, which begs the question, Why when it was standardised did they replace those with and double it up for the /f/ sound, Was that perhaps already common use at the time?
They should bring these back, Welsh doesn’t really fit a Latin script and it’s become a bit of a meme that it’s spelt nothing like it’s pronounced, if they had unique letters for the unique sounds, it might still be confusing at first but once you learn what sounds those letters make it will become much easier to learn Welsh.
Welsh is almost entirely phonetic thanks to a spelling reform that took place in the 1930s (I believe), although I understand where you’re coming from, none of these letters had unique sounds except for the double LL
"Edd" still exists as part of International Phonetic Alphabet used to represent the voiced TH sound. It is also used in Icelandic. It's a modified form of D. "DD" was probably an alternative. "K" should reintroduced to Welsh as it's now used for many "international" words like the "kilo-" prefixed Metric measements, and adopted words etc. Spanish and Portuguese have added K to their alpabets for that reason. Regarding the "Welsh V", MY theory is that the Classic Latin alphabet had the letter "V" to use for the "u" "v" and "w" sounds. In the Middle Ages scribes, working in other languages, develped the convention of rounding the base to represent a vowel (u) and using a pointed base to represent a consonant (v) and doubling it to represent a semi-vowel (uu, w)) The stylised "Welsh V" was an early attempt to seperate U & V this way.
That’s true, we might see the K re-enter the Welsh alphabet for borrowed words, like the letter J did. I also like your theory, thank you for sharing it, it makes a lot of sense for it to be some sort of an attempt to separate several sounds that were previously written as a single letter.
Fascinating! I love unique letters that differentiate a language's orthography completely from those of its neighbours. The more modern spelling reform might have been necessary to keep up with pronunciation (see Irish Gaelic and the disaster that is its spelling system), but I don't agree that this older one was. Conforming Welsh orthography to that of a larger, neighbouring language for the sake of a machine was a loss of language diversity that's always sad to see.
It's funny that in Breton, they chose to take out the C and replace it by K (first half of the 19th century) which means that nowadays the C is not in the official alphabet anymore (only left in combination with H, like CH & C'H. The 1st one is like the French one, so like English SH. The second like in Welsh CH)
In Middle Cornish both the C and K were used, so Cornish (the name of the language) was written Cernewec or Kernuak. In revived Cornish it's Kernewek, Kernowek or Kernuack. (Cernyweg in modern Welsh, and Kerniweg or Corneueg in Middle Welsh).
That Welsh LL is so strange until you get used to it, practicing. It sounds and feels like a "blurry L" or a cross between a strong H and an L with a little hint of SH thrown in. The ligature letters used for it almost make sense, but are too easily confused with IL and tt. If they had put a raised and lowered L, crossed so the first L's foot crosses the second L's middle, so it's a double corner, that might have looked easier to distinguish. -- The barred D eth/edh Ð/ð did make sense, bt was "killed" by the Norman French scribes who (eventually) got rid of thorn Þ/þ and edh Ð/ð from English too, which is why we have only TH, plus the false Y in Ye old shoppe. -- That open 6, some sort of B or V sound, maybe? That's new to me. Medieval writing had b, v, and w forms which sometimes looked very similar, even a w with one or two ascender flourishes at times, so that it looked like a cross between a b and a w.
I agree, it took me a while in school to get a hang of the "LL" sound (we didn't do a lot of Welsh in primary school unfortunately), once you get the hang of it though it's dead easy
It really is a different sound to "regular" english. Almost as if you say L at the same time as CH and SH. That is, the english CH, not the dutch or german CH which are completely different.
Those medieval letters that were unique to Welsh are so interesting! I hope someone actually does the proper research to figure out their history. Since I don't speak Welsh (much less medieval Welsh) I don't dare to even try, but I'd love to know more. Of course medieval writing had plenty of unusual glyphs and graphemes used to different degrees in different areas, so it's not surprising to find unique letters in a particular language, but it would still be fascinating to find out the particular circumstances behind these ones
Always regarded the Welsh Nation very highly. Their history tells us how great they are, from fighting invaders of these lands, to their performance in rugby, singing and that lovely accent. Peace be unto you.
I think that eth was originally an abbreviation. In middle ages and Renaissance they used a lot of them, including some letters with stroke : ꝑ (for -par- or -per-), ꝗ (for -qui-), and đ (in french it was used for -de-, but it could vary with languages). I think that's why you can find both "newydd" and "newyđ" in the same text. The icelandic form ð is basically the same letter but shaped after a blackletter "d", which ascender is not vertical but sloped.
The case of having both eth and dd on the same page might have to do with usage of space. The edh appears on a line that is thickly packed with letters, the dd on a line that is much sparser. It seems well possible that the eth has been used to make it possible to keep everything on the line, rather than having to move the last word to the next line.
The ɬ is a letter used in a language in my area of North America called Chinuk Wawa, such as in some words and phrases like "chaku-ɬush" (get better) and ɬushmən (woman). Yes, the ɬushmən does just literally translate as "good man" but the "mən" part is not exclusively meant as "man," I don't know the exact etymology since there are a couple loan words from English which use the -mən ending too, such as "watchmən" meaning (obviously) "watchman" or "guard." Lots of NA languages use the ɬ letter quite often. Cool to see that welsh has the same!
Came late to this party. Been studying old english and norse for some time so đ is familiar, recently started looking into welsh and breton and this old v is very interesting to me! Never seen that before Diolch
I was wondering the other day why English used to have a specific letter for the 'th' sound (thorn), but that modern Welsh has a "th," which to me seems almost like a hybrid letter.
Again, for "dd," English had a crossed d as an equivalent. So I guess my query is why old English had single characters for these consonants, but Welsh has the double characters Dd and Th. Perhaps it just comes down to the languages being codified differently over time.
Unfortunately I’m not really sure where the Anglo Saxons got their letters from, but I don’t think the old symbol for “dd” that I showed in this video is from the Roman alphabet. Like you said I think it just comes down to how different languages are codified, but it’s interesting to think about
It seems to me that Welsh had the precedent of Latin orthography for the 'th' spelling, which originally was just a breathy 't' sound, hence why the Romans didn't borrow theta from Greek, whereas the Anglo-Saxons already had a writing system tailored to their language that they could borrow from. The 'ð' question is a total mystery to me. Maybe it's just that the 'dd' digraph looks neat.
They really should fix the K thing and make it sound like written, both to make language easier to learn and to show middle finger to remnants of English colonialism :(
circassian (north caucasus) has the LL sound, and also another variant of it that is harder you had already written it but i just wanted to pinpoint :)
@@CambrianChronicles the first one is basically the same as the one you use, the second one resembles the one that aztecs use, i guess the best way to describe is "TL" and resembles a click sound
I have a theory why sometimes eth was used in lieu of dd: Both examples you mention are close to the end of the line. I think the scribes used the alternative to conserve space to end the line at the correct length.
Ah yes, the christian o. As an Icelander, who still uses ð daily, one of my pet peeves is when people confuse it with an o (remember that old 'millionaire' meme with the presumed "town" (actually a municipality) of "fjaroarbyggo" (actually "fjarðarbyggð")? I do. All too well.)
I don't know if it's worth mentioning on a video that focuses on Welsh (great video btw!), but the eth letter in Old English could be used for both the voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives. Only in Icelandic is it used for the voiced. Old English writings use both thorn and eth (although, most often thorn in the extant writings) interchangeably - sometimes with the spellings for the same words swapping its use - and it doesn't seem to be related to syllabic stress just whatever the writer felt like at the time.
Both the eth and the thorn were used for both. Which one was used depended a bit on the writer, period and customs. The thorn is usually the unvoiced and the voiced, but the opposite also happened. And The thorn was often put at the beginning and the eth at the end of words, but that also isn't a guarantee. And in some way english has never lost that kind of chaotic "do what you want" system. I mean, I can do labour in the harbor on a gray coloured ship of the defence forces before I realize that my friends want to have a few pints in the city centre. Yes, those are all correct words and they all have equally correct alternative spellings.
It's funny you didn't pronounce the tl in Nahuatl like how "tll" would be pronounced in Welsh, considering you in particular would theoretically be able to say it.
Probably the only one that could quite easily be brought back tbf, although the rules for whether a K or a C should be used might be a bit confusing. Interestingly, Cornish, the language most similar to Welsh, still uses the K!
In Farsi, و (which looks a lot like your letter upside down) makes the v, oo, and ue sounds -as well as w in Afghan dialects. It’s taken from Arabic where is served a similar function. The Arabic alphabet is unchanged since the 8th century. Maybe some Welshman brought it back from the crusades?
Does the double L always make that sound, or is it only at the beginning of words? When you say things like Llewellyn, I only hear it at the beginning and not in the middle.
I think that around the late 16th to early 17th century the use of multiple spellings of the same word in the one document became something of a fad. Shakespear spelled his own name several different ways.
To be fair, Shakspeare was also incredibly gifted at creating language. Shakspere created many new words and the works of Shakespeare are full of creativity. One could say that Shaksper was truly a master at his craft. But now I wonder which of his ancestors was so frightened or exited on the battlefield, that his spear shaked in his hands.
Fun fact the letter y and w exited in the portuguese language and came back, y has the same sound i but gramatical reforms made the y useless for exemple hynmo became hino and the w has v just like in german but in portuguese no word that i know( i an a native speaker)uses letter w.
Late to this, but: the Welsh v. The moment I saw it, I immediately recognized it as just…v. Because that’s what it is, and that way of writing the letter isn’t uncommon. Don’t get me wrong, the longer first strike is a little unusual, but not unreasonably so. Just stylistic.
Pronounce [l], like the regular letter ⟨L⟩ in English. Don't move after you pronounce it, keep your lips and tongue at the same spot and try to pronounce [s] without moving your tongue. The sound you created isn't [s], it's [ɬ]. Now you know.
The ll sound is found in a few other European languages according to Wikipedia. Like Norwegian and Turkish. That's not really the point of the video though, so it's a bit nitpicking
I wasn’t sure whether to include them as Wikipedia describes the sound in Norwegian as an approximate, and the one in Turkish as a bit different to the one in Welsh, so I just went with the two languages that seemed the most certain
Small asterisk, in English ð also often was used for the voiceless dental fricative [θ]. English historically has never distinguished [θ] and [ð] in orthography.
Middle Welsh V: see Petrovskaia, Natalia I. (2020), Delw y Byd: a medieval Welsh encyclopedia (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association) p. 39-40.
I have an ancestor called Rhirid flaidd, cynddelw ap brydydd mawr write an eulogy to him I have a copy in old Welsh and modern day Welsh ❤️ he was my 23rd gt grandfather he fought for Madog ap Maredydd and Henry 2nd of England against Owain Gwynedd
"Absolutely necessary;" they were necessary at the time, but it's really annoying that this furthered the fact that nobody uses any form of english with consistent spelling to phonetic reading and the welsh language also suffered the same fate. The fact that it was only removed indefinitely because of people not wanting to just make more letters is a lame excuse for lessening my experience of speaking today, and there's nothing I can do about it, except to be an annoying "spelling reform" guy, which I'd rather not be.
I don't know -- I feel rather frustrated by the 20th century orthographic reform of Welsh. On one level, that it kept the whole doubling n and r thing is just maddening. But then it doesn't keep it in monosyllables where it would actually be useful, resorting to diacritics with pairs like glan (the plural of which is glannau, suggesting a singular *glann) and glân. And then there's the weird inconsistent approach to the aspirate mutation: we still write ei phen, but no longer gorphen. We should either have kept the ph/ff split or scrapped it completely. As for the letter 6, it would be useful to have different letters for when w is a consonant and a vowel and avoiding the mess of distinguishing men (gwŷr) from the third person singular of the verb to know (gŵyr) by scattering accents all over the place.
"Hello. What the hell is this?"
How every video should start.
Haha thank you!
I have the Tolkien book containing the issue that you refer to ("English and Welsh"). It's absolutely interesting. He was a big Welsh enthusiast.
That's very cool! Tolkien was a big enthusiast which is always really interesting to see, especially in how it influenced his writings
After all, language was his primary thing, novels only joined because there needs to be someone to speek his languages.
@@CambrianChronicles There's a bit of Welsh in his Elven.
@@efnissienhe created Sindarin, which was heavily inspired by welsh
Regarding the word newydd being spelled differently on the same page, it looks like the typesetter only used newyð because it made that line of text the perfect length.
The mixed use of ð and dd in Salisbury's Bible is not surprising if you've ever seen the Gutenberg Bible. Typographers of incunabula (early books) aimed to emulate the mannerisms of blackletter scribes, and that often included a) variants of letters to avoid the "repetitive" look of perfectly-uniform print that we now take for granted, and b) using sigla and contractions, often inconsistently; this was seen as more naturalistic. In total the Gutenberg type had 290 different glyphs, far more than any Italian or modern typeface would use for Latin.
One of the benefits of this was ensuring there was no ragged right edge and that every line was fully packed; note that in your first example, the typographer readily put hyphenation in words that only had one letter on the line, like "yddo" near the bottom, which would be a faux pas in modern convention (we generally try to respect syllable breaks.) By putting ð instead of dd, they were able to avoid cutting "di" in half, or, more likely, bumping it down a line, as @annayosh noted.
Just want to agree with everyone else. This is a great channel! You present unique topics in an informative but humorous way. They are a joy to watch. Diolch yn fawr!
Thank you so much for your support, I really appreciate it!
Ia diolch yn fawr iawn !!!
Can't wait til I can obnoxiously tell people "I followed Cambrian chronicles before he hit 2 million subs 😒😒"
I tell people that everyday, they never seem to know what I’m talking about though :/
Right when I decide to start learning a rare language, Welsh, I find your channel. Amazing. This is a sign. I hope you post more linguistics! Maybe basic Welsh grammar hahahaha
I’d definitely like to cover more on the Welsh language, although as a Welsh learner myself I can’t be very authoritative on learning the language!
Hello again everyone, I apologise there being such a long wait time between this video and the last one.
Full disclosure, there should have been a video last week, but after 3 weeks of making it I realised that it had essentially fallen apart, I wasn’t happy with it and I didn’t want to upload it. I will revisit and complete that video eventually, but I thought I’d try and make a shorter one for you guys in the meantime.
It was disheartening to spend almost all of my free time on a project only to have it be very terrible, but I’m happy with this video, and I’m really happy with how my channel has been growing! I’m eternally grateful to everyone who subscribed, I’ll be making a few shorter videos (like this one) that should hopefully only take 1-2 weeks to make, I hope you enjoy!
I don’t often subscribe to anybody but you really deserve mine at least, hopefully you’ll get many more for your truly interesting video and also for not begging me to subscribe which I really hate , so a thumbs up and a sub off me !!! Well done truly informative video !!! Diolch yn fawr iawn neu diolch yn dew fatha fusa nain yn ddeud !!! Peace out from the police state of north Wales 🏴
I would like to see a video about Welsh folklore/ bedtime stories and even traditions and superstitions (separately of course) . I am curious about how they match with the ones from my country.
I would definitely love to do another video on Welsh mythology/superstitions etc, I’ve only ever made one but I’ve always had plans for more, I’ve just never gotten around to it! (Hence why there’s a Welsh mythology playlist with only one video in it)
I'm studying in Bangor for my uni degree at the moment, and I love watching your videos to learn more about the history of the country! Keep up the great work!
Thank you so much!
Hi again. I’m still watching all of your videos and that joke about your grandma seeing the devil himself was great. You’re absolutely hilarious great job.
Thank you!
Fun fact: in Hebrew, the Welsh V is identical to the handwritten form of the letter Tet (ט)
Oh yeah, they do look pretty similar! Especially what Wikipedia tells me is the “imperial Aramaic” version: 𐡈 vs Ỽ.
No way you're here!
I’m both welsh and Jewish and I find this so sweet and interesting
Now this is the kind of content I like to see! Niche historical information presented in a non boring paper style, especially about orthography & language in general.
Old letters always seem prettier cause there is some mystery in them. Same with old letters in Cyrillic, which aren't used anymore
I agree! There’s an inherent air of mystery around old symbols that we don’t use anymore
@@CambrianChronicles that is why people like Viking runes after all
Criminally underrated channel
English had the same problem with printing and it lost various letters as well, including thorn which provides a 'th' sound. Printers tended to replace it with a 'y' which leads to the misunderstanding that 'ye' (as in ye olde...) is the singular of 'you' whereas it is of course 'the'. You can tell eth was lost in English from words like clothe. The other printing one is the letter yogh which got replaced with a 'z' and that is why Menzies should be pronounced as if it's a gh in the middle not a z....
That's fascinating, I hadn't heard of yogh before, thank you for sharing!
Don't forget the wynn, which was replaced by the w.
That's not terribly helpful, given that 'gh' in modern English, while sometimes pronounced 'f' as in 'rough' or 'cough' is also often silent as in 'through', 'bough', or 'thought' . If I'm not mistaken, in Old English it was more consistently pronounced rather like modern German 'ch' or the Scots 'ch' in 'loch'.
@@davidbouvier8895 . I don't understand your reply. I was pointing out that various letters have been lost, primarily caused by the introduction of printing. The loss of the letters leads to pronunciation changes and the loss of some distinction in pronunciation. Whilst the loss of the long 'S' isn't really an issue, problems have been caused with understanding pronunciation with the loss of letters that had specific pronunciations. Thorn is the most obvious one as printers replaced it with a 'y' as a substitute, which readers in the C16th understood but is not now understood by most people. The character yogh impacts on pronunciation of Scottish names like Menzies for example where what is now a 'z' was the character yogh. Language is complex and unless someone invents a time machine, we'll probably never really understand how or why it's evolved.
@@davidbouvier8895yogh looked like Ȝ ȝ, which is very close to a handwritten z of the time, so in many cases it was just replaced with a z.
For some examples "niȝt" would be pronounced "night" and "yȝe" would be pronounced "eye"
And the common form of the þ during middle english looked very similar to y, creating "ye olde" instead of "þe old" English even had informal and formal pronouns with þou and þe/you
But yes, modern english has no real system, lots of different dialects, pronunciations and languages coming together creating some wild mess.
Your doing pretty well, got nice editing, a good mic, pleaseant voice and a neat subject you cover. with time I'm certain you'll grow big. Can't wait for your next video on Welsh History
Thank you so much, I’m glad you’re enjoying the videos!
thanks for this informative video it got me thunkin about how cool and distinct the welsh alphabet is
Thank you! It is a very cool language!
very interesting!!! SUBSCRIBED!!!
0:51 The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (ɬ in the IPA, ll in Welsh) is actually a very common sound specifically among American Indian languages, occurring in languages from Greelandic to Chickasaw to Navajo to the mention Nahuatl (even occurring in the name of Nahuatl)
im warm springs and yakama from the pacific northwest and in my language: ichishkíin, we have the double l sound. since english is my first language trying to say ł to speak my indigenous languge is difficult. i didn't know that sound is in welsh also. it's so cool to learn that :)
That's very cool, thanks for sharing! It's definitely a tricky sound to get, but you'll get the hang of it eventually
BEST CHANNEL EVERRRRRR
Thank you so much!
the Middle-Welsh V definitely reminds me of the way i've seen some Roman cursive write their letter u/v/w !!
just discovered the channel and loving it so far, awesome job ❤
Ah ok, that's really interesting! Thanks for watching
Nearly 200k subs now
Excellent work in such a short amount of time!
another great video i love your channel keep it up :D
Thank you so much for watching!
"200 subscribers" ooo it's been a long way already, nearly a thousand times as many... I look forward to you achieving that 200K mark.
Thank you, Cambrian Chronicles. Very cool ! 😎
Glad you enjoyed it!
One thing I've always been curious about in Welsh Orthography is why /f/ is written , With a single instead representing the /v/ sound, As far as I can tell was used for /v/ in some older Welsh documents, As was as you mentioned, which begs the question, Why when it was standardised did they replace those with and double it up for the /f/ sound, Was that perhaps already common use at the time?
Make more videos man this content I could watch for hours and hours, love the research you do!
Thank you, there are many more on the way!
They should bring these back, Welsh doesn’t really fit a Latin script and it’s become a bit of a meme that it’s spelt nothing like it’s pronounced, if they had unique letters for the unique sounds, it might still be confusing at first but once you learn what sounds those letters make it will become much easier to learn Welsh.
Welsh is almost entirely phonetic thanks to a spelling reform that took place in the 1930s (I believe), although I understand where you’re coming from, none of these letters had unique sounds except for the double LL
"dd" can be written as Ðð as it makes the same sound in Icelandic. Also your "th" can be a Þþ.
@@oligultonnDonald Duck take note! 🤣
thats complete bollocks
In an age of computer scripts and fonts it makes sense, we've moved on from mechanical printing presses with limited alphabets
What a fantastic channel, diolch yn fawr for making such great content!
Thank you!
"Edd" still exists as part of International Phonetic Alphabet used to represent the voiced TH sound. It is also used in Icelandic. It's a modified form of D. "DD" was probably an alternative. "K" should reintroduced to Welsh as it's now used for many "international" words like the "kilo-" prefixed Metric measements, and adopted words etc. Spanish and Portuguese have added K to their alpabets for that reason. Regarding the "Welsh V", MY theory is that the Classic Latin alphabet had the letter "V" to use for the "u" "v" and "w" sounds. In the Middle Ages scribes, working in other languages, develped the convention of rounding the base to represent a vowel (u) and using a pointed base to represent a consonant (v) and doubling it to represent a semi-vowel (uu, w)) The stylised "Welsh V" was an early attempt to seperate U & V this way.
That’s true, we might see the K re-enter the Welsh alphabet for borrowed words, like the letter J did. I also like your theory, thank you for sharing it, it makes a lot of sense for it to be some sort of an attempt to separate several sounds that were previously written as a single letter.
K only exissts in Foreign loanwords
Have you ever heard a North Welshman pronounce w? I’ve tried it and almost choked on my tongue!
Classical Latin used ⟨V⟩ only for [u] and [w], it didn't have a [v] sound
Fascinating! I love unique letters that differentiate a language's orthography completely from those of its neighbours.
The more modern spelling reform might have been necessary to keep up with pronunciation (see Irish Gaelic and the disaster that is its spelling system), but I don't agree that this older one was. Conforming Welsh orthography to that of a larger, neighbouring language for the sake of a machine was a loss of language diversity that's always sad to see.
0:41 Isn't it found in Faroese too? I'm not certain but I seem to recall it being there.
It's funny that in Breton, they chose to take out the C and replace it by K (first half of the 19th century) which means that nowadays the C is not in the official alphabet anymore (only left in combination with H, like CH & C'H. The 1st one is like the French one, so like English SH. The second like in Welsh CH)
That's really interesting, Cornish still has the K as well, making Welsh a but unique in that regard nowadays
In Middle Cornish both the C and K were used, so Cornish (the name of the language) was written Cernewec or Kernuak. In revived Cornish it's Kernewek, Kernowek or Kernuack. (Cernyweg in modern Welsh, and Kerniweg or Corneueg in Middle Welsh).
@@CambrianChronicles In Cornish C is frequently used an can be used even without H
Almost all Celtic languages use C commonly
@@CambrianChroniclesTrue, but Breton is basically useless language to learn. Everyone there speaks French so the info provided by OP is niche
Did you know that the ll sound is also present in Sardinia in the speakers of Sassarese and surrounding dialects? :D
I didn’t! Thanks for sharing
That Welsh LL is so strange until you get used to it, practicing. It sounds and feels like a "blurry L" or a cross between a strong H and an L with a little hint of SH thrown in. The ligature letters used for it almost make sense, but are too easily confused with IL and tt. If they had put a raised and lowered L, crossed so the first L's foot crosses the second L's middle, so it's a double corner, that might have looked easier to distinguish. -- The barred D eth/edh Ð/ð did make sense, bt was "killed" by the Norman French scribes who (eventually) got rid of thorn Þ/þ and edh Ð/ð from English too, which is why we have only TH, plus the false Y in Ye old shoppe. -- That open 6, some sort of B or V sound, maybe? That's new to me. Medieval writing had b, v, and w forms which sometimes looked very similar, even a w with one or two ascender flourishes at times, so that it looked like a cross between a b and a w.
I agree, it took me a while in school to get a hang of the "LL" sound (we didn't do a lot of Welsh in primary school unfortunately), once you get the hang of it though it's dead easy
It really is a different sound to "regular" english. Almost as if you say L at the same time as CH and SH. That is, the english CH, not the dutch or german CH which are completely different.
Those medieval letters that were unique to Welsh are so interesting! I hope someone actually does the proper research to figure out their history. Since I don't speak Welsh (much less medieval Welsh) I don't dare to even try, but I'd love to know more.
Of course medieval writing had plenty of unusual glyphs and graphemes used to different degrees in different areas, so it's not surprising to find unique letters in a particular language, but it would still be fascinating to find out the particular circumstances behind these ones
Always regarded the Welsh Nation very highly. Their history tells us how great they are, from fighting invaders of these lands, to their performance in rugby, singing and that lovely accent. Peace be unto you.
I think that eth was originally an abbreviation. In middle ages and Renaissance they used a lot of them, including some letters with stroke : ꝑ (for -par- or -per-), ꝗ (for -qui-), and đ (in french it was used for -de-, but it could vary with languages). I think that's why you can find both "newydd" and "newyđ" in the same text. The icelandic form ð is basically the same letter but shaped after a blackletter "d", which ascender is not vertical but sloped.
The case of having both eth and dd on the same page might have to do with usage of space. The edh appears on a line that is thickly packed with letters, the dd on a line that is much sparser. It seems well possible that the eth has been used to make it possible to keep everything on the line, rather than having to move the last word to the next line.
That's a great point, and would explain why he started using it out of nowhere, thanks!
The ɬ is a letter used in a language in my area of North America called Chinuk Wawa, such as in some words and phrases like "chaku-ɬush" (get better) and ɬushmən (woman). Yes, the ɬushmən does just literally translate as "good man" but the "mən" part is not exclusively meant as "man," I don't know the exact etymology since there are a couple loan words from English which use the -mən ending too, such as "watchmən" meaning (obviously) "watchman" or "guard." Lots of NA languages use the ɬ letter quite often.
Cool to see that welsh has the same!
The tl sound is found in my moms dialect of norwegian, too, in the valley Gudbrandsdalen
Came late to this party.
Been studying old english and norse for some time so đ is familiar, recently started looking into welsh and breton and this old v is very interesting to me! Never seen that before
Diolch
I was wondering the other day why English used to have a specific letter for the 'th' sound (thorn), but that modern Welsh has a "th," which to me seems almost like a hybrid letter.
Again, for "dd," English had a crossed d as an equivalent. So I guess my query is why old English had single characters for these consonants, but Welsh has the double characters Dd and Th. Perhaps it just comes down to the languages being codified differently over time.
Unfortunately I’m not really sure where the Anglo Saxons got their letters from, but I don’t think the old symbol for “dd” that I showed in this video is from the Roman alphabet. Like you said I think it just comes down to how different languages are codified, but it’s interesting to think about
It seems to me that Welsh had the precedent of Latin orthography for the 'th' spelling, which originally was just a breathy 't' sound, hence why the Romans didn't borrow theta from Greek, whereas the Anglo-Saxons already had a writing system tailored to their language that they could borrow from.
The 'ð' question is a total mystery to me. Maybe it's just that the 'dd' digraph looks neat.
My favorite is just sprinkling in letters like this into my calligraphy. Makes it look way cooler lol.
This was so interesting!
Thank you!
3:30 that joke alone got me an upvote
We should restore these letters.
It’d be interesting but would probably just confuse people in the end, especially the Middle Welsh V since that one didn’t even have a concrete use
They really should fix the K thing and make it sound like written, both to make language easier to learn and to show middle finger to remnants of English colonialism :(
circassian (north caucasus) has the LL sound, and also another variant of it that is harder
you had already written it but i just wanted to pinpoint :)
That’s very cool, I didn’t know there were different variants of it
@@CambrianChronicles the first one is basically the same as the one you use, the second one resembles the one that aztecs use, i guess the best way to describe is "TL" and resembles a click sound
That’s really interesting, I had no idea! Thanks for sharing
Have you done one on the printing ban in wales ????
I haven’t heard of that before, if you have any sources on it I can try and take a look sometime in the future
I have a theory why sometimes eth was used in lieu of dd: Both examples you mention are close to the end of the line. I think the scribes used the alternative to conserve space to end the line at the correct length.
Really too notch content.
Thank you!
Ah yes, the christian o.
As an Icelander, who still uses ð daily, one of my pet peeves is when people confuse it with an o (remember that old 'millionaire' meme with the presumed "town" (actually a municipality) of "fjaroarbyggo" (actually "fjarðarbyggð")? I do. All too well.)
I don't know if it's worth mentioning on a video that focuses on Welsh (great video btw!), but the eth letter in Old English could be used for both the voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives. Only in Icelandic is it used for the voiced. Old English writings use both thorn and eth (although, most often thorn in the extant writings) interchangeably - sometimes with the spellings for the same words swapping its use - and it doesn't seem to be related to syllabic stress just whatever the writer felt like at the time.
Both the eth and the thorn were used for both. Which one was used depended a bit on the writer, period and customs. The thorn is usually the unvoiced and the voiced, but the opposite also happened. And The thorn was often put at the beginning and the eth at the end of words, but that also isn't a guarantee.
And in some way english has never lost that kind of chaotic "do what you want" system.
I mean, I can do labour in the harbor on a gray coloured ship of the defence forces before I realize that my friends want to have a few pints in the city centre.
Yes, those are all correct words and they all have equally correct alternative spellings.
It's funny you didn't pronounce the tl in Nahuatl like how "tll" would be pronounced in Welsh, considering you in particular would theoretically be able to say it.
Bring back K to Welsh!
Probably the only one that could quite easily be brought back tbf, although the rules for whether a K or a C should be used might be a bit confusing.
Interestingly, Cornish, the language most similar to Welsh, still uses the K!
@@CambrianChronicles I did not realize that about Cornish very interesting....
@@CambrianChronicles Then maybe Cornish should drop K and use C for only Cuh sound
I guess that would make the 'h' in 'ch' redundant, and you could shorten it.
@@LobertERee True
In Farsi, و (which looks a lot like your letter upside down) makes the v, oo, and ue sounds -as well as w in Afghan dialects.
It’s taken from Arabic where is served a similar function. The Arabic alphabet is unchanged since the 8th century. Maybe some Welshman brought it back from the crusades?
It's an interesting thought, although I think the crusades are a bit too late, I believe its in earlier texts
Does the double L always make that sound, or is it only at the beginning of words? When you say things like Llewellyn, I only hear it at the beginning and not in the middle.
0:30 the Tluh😂😂?
If you study history major, could you work in researcing these? Seems fun, but not for future finances 😭
I think that around the late 16th to early 17th century the use of multiple spellings of the same word in the one document became something of a fad. Shakespear spelled his own name several different ways.
To be fair, Shakspeare was also incredibly gifted at creating language. Shakspere created many new words and the works of Shakespeare are full of creativity. One could say that Shaksper was truly a master at his craft.
But now I wonder which of his ancestors was so frightened or exited on the battlefield, that his spear shaked in his hands.
"This one looks like two penguins" now I can't get this image out of my head.
I’m glad! I hope my incredible artistic rendition helped the visualisation
I remember the old thumbnail of this video where k was called “too gross”
My finest creation
Fun fact the letter y and w exited in the portuguese language and came back, y has the same sound i but gramatical reforms made the y useless for exemple hynmo became hino and the w has v just like in german but in portuguese no word that i know( i an a native speaker)uses letter w.
that can't be right, penguins don't have hands
Late to this, but: the Welsh v. The moment I saw it, I immediately recognized it as just…v. Because that’s what it is, and that way of writing the letter isn’t uncommon. Don’t get me wrong, the longer first strike is a little unusual, but not unreasonably so. Just stylistic.
Beautiful beginning. Hello. What the hell is this?
The Printing Press and (later) computers destroyed a lot the more unique character in scripts. It's rather sad...
Pronounce [l], like the regular letter ⟨L⟩ in English.
Don't move after you pronounce it, keep your lips and tongue at the same spot and try to pronounce [s] without moving your tongue. The sound you created isn't [s], it's [ɬ].
Now you know.
The ll sound is found in a few other European languages according to Wikipedia. Like Norwegian and Turkish. That's not really the point of the video though, so it's a bit nitpicking
I wasn’t sure whether to include them as Wikipedia describes the sound in Norwegian as an approximate, and the one in Turkish as a bit different to the one in Welsh, so I just went with the two languages that seemed the most certain
@@CambrianChronicles I've heard it on turkish it's more than similar
3:23 I think it’s pretty obvious what that means
Small asterisk, in English ð also often was used for the voiceless dental fricative [θ]. English historically has never distinguished [θ] and [ð] in orthography.
Yup, the difference between þ and ð was more stylistic than systematic.
Psst bro where is our "stupid welsh fictional animals I'm glad don't exist" video? :P
Middle Welsh V: see Petrovskaia, Natalia I. (2020), Delw y Byd: a medieval Welsh encyclopedia (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association) p. 39-40.
Thank you, I'll definitely check those out
Diolch o chi'n gwaith! Mae'n wych!
Croeso!
I have an ancestor called Rhirid flaidd, cynddelw ap brydydd mawr write an eulogy to him I have a copy in old Welsh and modern day Welsh ❤️ he was my 23rd gt grandfather he fought for Madog ap Maredydd and Henry 2nd of England against Owain Gwynedd
That's fascinating, incredible that you could trace it back so far!
Khymru from a tribe of Syrians fleeing the Romans, settled 2 millenia when Wales was very very empty and introduced Christianity to Britain.
Ð is cool, also we still have the letter ð
I looked at the thumbnail and said, “Oh, you’re beautiful!” As if the Welsh V was a person or an animal
It's true to be fair, it's a very cool looking letter
Wow
Tolkien fans who forget he was a scholar before he was a fantasy legend do be really surprised with this video lol
Old Welsh LI reminda reminda me of corpus
1:48
This IS how they flexed their skills ans knowledge Back than. That's why.
To be fair. I understand.
Diolch!
Croeso!
I don't think Icelandic has the LL sound.
“They were unique to the welsh language”
Literally K:
"Absolutely necessary;" they were necessary at the time, but it's really annoying that this furthered the fact that nobody uses any form of english with consistent spelling to phonetic reading and the welsh language also suffered the same fate. The fact that it was only removed indefinitely because of people not wanting to just make more letters is a lame excuse for lessening my experience of speaking today, and there's nothing I can do about it, except to be an annoying "spelling reform" guy, which I'd rather not be.
I don't know -- I feel rather frustrated by the 20th century orthographic reform of Welsh. On one level, that it kept the whole doubling n and r thing is just maddening. But then it doesn't keep it in monosyllables where it would actually be useful, resorting to diacritics with pairs like glan (the plural of which is glannau, suggesting a singular *glann) and glân. And then there's the weird inconsistent approach to the aspirate mutation: we still write ei phen, but no longer gorphen. We should either have kept the ph/ff split or scrapped it completely. As for the letter 6, it would be useful to have different letters for when w is a consonant and a vowel and avoiding the mess of distinguishing men (gwŷr) from the third person singular of the verb to know (gŵyr) by scattering accents all over the place.
plez give weeido i mees it
New video will be out soon! Hoping to reach 500 subscribers soon so I can keep people updated on the community tab
3:23 lolololol
mathematicians would gladly use them
Honestly, X should make the Ch sound in Chwech. There is nothing X could do that Cs couldn't do.
the wucnky d used to be in old english
Could that "Welsh U" be related to Wynn ƿ?
Apparently it is, although its hard to find good sources on the matter
No. Wynn is from a runic letter. The Welsh U is just a stylized u.
Will the Welsh language live if these letters die?
Hmmmm, Efallai y byddaf yn dechrau eu defnyddio eto yn Gymraeg ysgrifenedig.
Wierd side note but Nahuatl is pronounced [nawatɬ] not [naɦʷatɫ̩] lol
funny weedio make me and mother laufgh so mooch
Thank you so much, I’m glad it made you laugh!
We still use letter ð
That’s very cool! Which language still uses that letter if you don’t mind me asking?
@@CambrianChronicles Icelandic and Faroese
Ah that’s very interesting! Icelandic also has the “ll” sound if I’m not mistaken
@@CambrianChronicles wow
Yes we do, both when written "ll" but also in rl tl kl and hl