A Grammar of the Welsh Language
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The Lexicographical Contribution to Welsh
Coping with an expanding vocabulary: the lexicographical contribution to Welsh Abstract The Welsh language, as a lesser-used language with English as an immediate neighbour, has inevitably borrowed much of its vocabulary from that language (or its precursors) as well as inheriting a considerable vocabulary from Latin via Brythonic. Welsh lexicography dates back to at least the 15th-century bardic glossaries and the first Welsh dictionary was printed in the mid-16th century. Most Welsh dictionaries are bilingual with either Latin or English, and Welsh lexicographers have been surprisingly influential in the development of the lexicon with many of their neologisms being adopted into the modern lexicon. Modern prescriptive lexicography and terminology have tended to promote what some linguists deride as a ‘purist’ approach but which has in fact proved to be a practical solution which has succeeded in expanding the vocabulary in a way acceptable to many speakers. Inevitably, since all are fully bilingual, Welsh speakers in Wales have continued to borrow vocabulary extensively from English. 1. Introduction Yr ydym wedi bod yn rhy selog o lawer, yn y dyddiau a fu, yn dyfeisio geiriau newydd am bob dim …, gan dybied mai iaith bur yw iaith a’i geiriau’n perthyn dim i eiriau’r un iaith arall. Ffolineb yw hynny: y mae gan bob iaith allu i fabwysiadu geiriau estronol yn eiriau iddi ei hun. Ac y mae yr iaith Gymraeg wedi mabwysiadu cannoedd o eiriau Lladin a geiriau Saesneg erioed, ac y maent yn eitha-geiriau Cymraeg erbyn hyn. Y prawf o air Cymraeg yw, a arferir ef gan y bobl ai peidio? os y gwneir, y mae yn air Cymraeg; os na wneir, nid yw. -
Running Head: ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH and ORTHOGRAPHIC PROCESSING 1
Running head: ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH AND ORTHOGRAPHIC PROCESSING 1 This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article accepted in "Reading and Writing". The final authenticated version will be available at link.springer.com. The Effect of Orthographic Depth on Letter String Processing: The Case of Visual Attention Span and Rapid Automatized Naming Alexia Antzaka (ORCID iD: 0000-0002-3975-1122) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Departamento de Lengua Vasca y Comunicación, UPV/EHU, 48940, Leioa, Spain Clara Martin (ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2701-5045) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 48013, Bilbao, Spain Sendy Caffarra (ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3667-5061) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Sophie Schlöffel Running head: ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH AND ORTHOGRAPHIC PROCESSING 1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Departamento de Lengua Vasca y Comunicación, UPV/EHU, 48940, Leioa, Spain Manuel Carreiras (ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6726-7613) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Departamento de Lengua Vasca y Comunicación, UPV/EHU, 48940, Leioa, Spain Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 48013, Bilbao, Spain Marie Lallier (ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4340-1296) Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009, San Sebastián, Spain Author note The authors acknowledge financial support from the Basque Government (PRE_2015_2_0049 to A.A, PI_2015_1_25 to C.M, PRE_2015_2_0247 to S.S), the European Research Council (ERC-2011-ADG-295362 to M.C.), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI20153653383P to M.L., PSI20153673533R to M. -
Old and Middle Welsh David Willis ([email protected]) Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge
Old and Middle Welsh David Willis ([email protected]) Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge 1 INTRODUCTION The Welsh language emerged from the increasing dialect differentiation of the ancestral Brythonic language (also known as British or Brittonic) in the wake of the withdrawal of the Roman administration from Britain and the subsequent migration of Germanic speakers to Britain from the fifth century. Conventionally, Welsh is treated as a separate language from the mid sixth century. By this time, Brythonic speakers, who once occupied the whole of Britain apart from the north of Scotland, had been driven out of most of what is now England. Some Brythonic-speakers had migrated to Brittany from the late fifth century. Others had been pushed westwards and northwards into Wales, western and southwestern England, Cumbria and other parts of northern England and southern Scotland. With the defeat of the Romano-British forces at Dyrham in 577, the Britons in Wales were cut off by land from those in the west and southwest of England. Linguistically more important, final unstressed syllables were lost (apocope) in all varieties of Brythonic at about this time, a change intimately connected to the loss of morphological case. These changes are traditionally seen as having had such a drastic effect on the structure of the language as to mark a watershed in the development of Brythonic. From this period on, linguists refer to the Brythonic varieties spoken in Wales as Welsh; those in the west and southwest of England as Cornish; and those in Brittany as Breton. A fourth Brythonic language, Cumbric, emerged in the north of England, but died out, without leaving written records, in perhaps the eleventh century. -
Lenition of the Conjugated Prepositions in Irish and Welsh
Lenition of the Conjugated Prepositions in Irish and Welsh Sanne Jongeleen 3765105 25-07-2016 RMA Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Supervised by prof. dr. Peter Schrijver Plagiarism Statement I hereby declare that I have committed neither fraud nor plagiarism prior, during or after the process that has resulted in this thesis. 25-07-2016, Sanne Jongeleen 2 Table of Contents Table of Contents .................................................................................................. 3 Abbreviations ....................................................................................................... 4 0. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 6 1. Research Questions ........................................................................................... 8 2. Theoretical background ...................................................................................... 9 3. Methodology ................................................................................................... 14 4. Selected Corpus .............................................................................................. 18 4.1 Irish .......................................................................................................... 18 4.2 Welsh ........................................................................................................ 20 5. Selected Prepositions ...................................................................................... -
Y in Medieval Welsh Orthography Sims-Williams, Patrick
Aberystwyth University ‘Dark’ and ‘Clear’ Y in Medieval Welsh Orthography Sims-Williams, Patrick Published in: Transactions of the Philological Society DOI: 10.1111/1467-968X.12205 Publication date: 2021 Citation for published version (APA): Sims-Williams, P. (2021). ‘Dark’ and ‘Clear’ Y in Medieval Welsh Orthography: Caligula versus Teilo. Transactions of the Philological Society, 1191, 9-47. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12205 Document License CC BY-NC-ND General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Aberystwyth Research Portal (the Institutional Repository) are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Aberystwyth Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Aberystwyth Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. tel: +44 1970 62 2400 email: [email protected] Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 1191 (2021) 9–47 doi: 10.1111/1467-968X.12205 ‘DARK’ AND ‘CLEAR’ Y IN MEDIEVAL WELSH ORTHOGRAPHY: CALIGULA VERSUS TEILO By PATRICK SIMS-WILLIAMS Aberystwyth University (Submitted: 26 May, 2020; Accepted: 20 January, 2021) ABSTRACT A famous exception to the ‘phonetic spelling system’ of Welsh is the use of <y> for both /ǝ/ and the retracted high vowel /ɨ(:)/. -
Why Learning to Read Is Easier in Welsh Than in English: Orthographic Transparency Effects Evinced with Frequency-Matched Tests
Applied Psycholinguistics 22 (2001), 571–599 Printed in the United States of America Why learning to read is easier in Welsh than in English: Orthographic transparency effects evinced with frequency-matched tests NICK C. ELLIS and A. MARI HOOPER University of Wales, Bangor ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Nick C. Ellis, School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT This study compared the rate of literacy acquisition in orthographically transparent Welsh and ortho- graphically opaque English using reading tests that were equated for frequency of written exposure. Year 2 English-educated monolingual children were compared with Welsh-educated bilingual chil- dren, matched for reading instruction, background, locale, and math ability. Welsh children were able to read aloud accurately significantly more of their language (61% of tokens, 1821 types) than were English children (52% tokens, 716 types), allowing them to read aloud beyond their compre- hension levels (168 vs. 116%, respectively). Various observations suggested that Welsh readers were more reliant on an alphabetic decoding strategy: word length determined 70% of reading latency in Welsh but only 22% in English, and Welsh reading errors tended to be nonword mispro- nunciations, whereas English children made more real word substitutions and null attempts. These findings demonstrate that the orthographic transparency of a language can have a profound effect on the rate of acquisition and style of reading adopted by its speakers. Systems that are noisy and inconsistent are harder to sort out than systems that are reliable and categorical. There is now a large body of research demonstrating that greater ambiguity in the mappings between the forms and functions of a particular language causes less successful learning because of a larger degree of competition among the cues in the learning set (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987; MacWhinney, 1987). -
Welsh on The
Technical Report No: 2003/16 Issues in Creating HTML Pages with Welsh or bilingual Content John Dyke 26 November 2003 Department of Computing Faculty of Mathematics and Computing The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA United Kingdom http://computing.open.ac.uk l Issues in Creating HTML Pages with Welsh or bilingual Content John Dyke Summary Using utf-8 encoding web pages in HTML, XHTML or XML can contain all the letters used in Welsh including all of the diacritical marks used. These pages are rendered and display correctly on Microsoft's Internet Explorer from version 4 onwards and Netscape's browser from version 4. Opera supports all of the characters correctly from version 6 albeit with font substitution occurring for some of the less frequently used diacritical marks on w and y: the acen grom, the most frequently used diacritical mark, is rendered correctly. Opera's version 5.12 provides a reasonably good coverage. It displays the vowels a,e,i,o and u correctly with all diacritical marks but renders w, W, y and Y without an acen grom but produces blanks for the other less frequently used diacritical marks used over these characters. For wider support on older browsers, named character entities should be used for the characters a, e, i, o and u with diacritical marks. The remaining vowels w and y should coded either without diacritical marks or by some other representation e.g. the character followed by the diacritical mark (w^ in place of ŵ) The language used on a page should be denoted by using the lang attribute in the HTML mark up. -
Gender Across Languages: the Linguistic Representation of Women and Men
<DOCINFO AUTHOR "" TITLE "Gender Across Languages: The linguistic representation of women and men. Volume II" SUBJECT "Impact 10" KEYWORDS "" SIZE HEIGHT "220" WIDTH "150" VOFFSET "4"> Gender Across Languages Impact: Studies in language and society impact publishes monographs, collective volumes, and text books on topics in sociolinguistics. The scope of the series is broad, with special emphasis on areas such as language planning and language policies; language conflict and language death; language standards and language change; dialectology; diglossia; discourse studies; language and social identity (gender, ethnicity, class, ideology); and history and methods of sociolinguistics. General editor Annick De Houwer University of Antwerp Advisory board Ulrich Ammon William Labov Gerhard Mercator University University of Pennsylvania Laurie Bauer Elizabeth Lanza Victoria University of Wellington University of Oslo Jan Blommaert Joseph Lo Bianco Ghent University The Australian National University Paul Drew Peter Nelde University of York Catholic University Brussels Anna Escobar Dennis Preston University of Illinois at Urbana Michigan State University Guus Extra Jeanine Treffers-Daller Tilburg University University of the West of England Margarita Hidalgo Vic Webb San Diego State University University of Pretoria Richard A. Hudson University College London Volume 10 Gender Across Languages: The linguistic representation of women and men Volume II Edited by Marlis Hellinger and Hadumod Bußmann Gender Across Languages The linguistic representation of women and men volume 2 Edited by Marlis Hellinger University of Frankfurt am Main Hadumod Bußmann University of Munich John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American 8 National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. -
Welshlessons1.Pdf
Welsh Lessons © Antone Minard, 2016 This series of lessons is designed to accompany the Welsh courses I offer through the Vancouver Welsh Society, currently scheduled to meet once a week for two ten-week terms. They are designed to supplement the class meetings, or to substitute if you have missed a meeting, or just to serve as a reference. Because heritage language learners all come with different abilities and progress at different paces, each lesson is divided into three sections: Level A for Beginners, Level B for Intermediate, and Level C for advanced. Each lesson starts with a flowchart to help you assess your level for that particular lesson. This is a work in progress, and over the next year or so I will be adding dialogues, exercises, and example quotes from Welsh songs and folklore, and if I can find someone to contribute, illustrations. If there are errors, or if you find something confusing, please contact me at [email protected]. The Welsh Lessons here are meant to complement your other learning tools. There are a lot of great resources online, such as the Say Something in Welsh course (https://www.saysomethingin.com/welsh/course1). The awesome duolingo now has Welsh; it’s not perfect, but it’s very effective for progress in the early stages. Finally, of course, if you’re not a member of the Vancouver Welsh Society, why not join via Paypal as a thank you? Only $20 per year for an out-of-area membership. Lesson One: Alphabet & Pronunciation Diagnostic Page, Lesson 1 Question 1: No: Go to Level A Can you more or less pronounce Mae ’nghath i yn llwyd ? Yes: See Question 2 Question 2: No: Go to Level B Do you know whether the vowels in the words yr hen mab bach o Ben-y-Bont are long or short? Yes: See Question 3 Question 3: Can you predict how a Welsh No: Go to Level C speaker would change these dictionary words in the spoken language? cyfodi, dyfod, gorau, prynhawn, Yes: Skip Lesson One ysgubor Lesson One: Alphabet & Pronunciation Lesson One, Level A The English alphabet consists of 26 letters. -
Kent Academic Repository Full Text Document (Pdf)
Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Bailey, Laura Rudall (2013) The syntax of question particles. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, Newcastle University. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/80123/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html The Syntax of Question Particles Laura Rudall Bailey Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics/ Centre for Research in Linguistics and Language Sciences Newcastle University Examined: November 2012 Submitted: April 2013 Abstract Cross-linguistically, languages are largely head-initial or head-final. Most permit some disharmony, but Holmberg (2000) and Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts (2012), among others, have argued that the structure shown in (1) is ruled out, where YP is X’s complement and ZP is Y’s complement: (1) *[XP [YP Y ZP] X] In structures such as (1), a head-final phrase immediately dominates a head- initial phrase, violating the so-called ‘Final-Over-Final Constraint’ (FOFC). -
A New Orthography in Tera
A New Orthography in Tera Paul Tench Centre for Language and Communication Research Cardiff University Africa has a population of 797 million, speaking 2,092 languages, across 53 different countries. A sixth of Africa’s population live in Nigeria, approximately 130 million, and between them they speak about a quarter of those languages, 516 to be precise. Nigeria has the third largest number of languages within national borders in the world, following Papua New Guinea and Indonesia; India has 427 languages, and China 241 (Gordon & Grimes 2005). Of those 516 in Nigeria, 510 are indigenous; Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba are classified as major regional languages (‘languages of wider communication’); Edo, Efik, Fulfulde, Ibibio, Idoma, Itsekiri, Izon, Kanuri, Tiv, Urhobo, among others, are classified as ‘medium’ languages, leaving about 490 as ‘minority’ languages, spoken by about half of Nigeria’s population (see Igboanusi & Peter 2005: 6). Minority languages are largely unwritten, largely ignored in education and government, but nevertheless provide an essential factor in local social cohesion and the means of maintaining the integrity of a local, distinctive, culture; in other words, although minority languages may not mean a great deal to outsiders, they provide the social bonding among their native speakers. Minority language speakers have their own pride and aspirations for themselves and their people, just as much as the speakers of medium, major and international languages have. Among the minority groups in Nigeria, none have greater pride and sense of ambition than the Tera people. The Tera The Tera are one of the ethnic groups that occupy territory between the eastern border of the Hausa and the western border of the Kanuri speaking people in Northeast Nigeria. -
Chapter V Educational Provision in Wales Part
CHAPTER V EDUCATIONAL PROVISION IN WALES PART (i) : SCHOOLS In medieval Wales it was the Church which assumed the greatest responsibility for schooling, bardic schools and possibly the households of the Welsh lords being also centres of learning. The English universities, and to a lesser extent, the continental universities and the inns of court, provided further or higher 1 education for the ablest talents of Wales. In England, by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, lay involvement in educati4n increased, as the needs of the Crown, the aristocracy and the towns expanded, and this was also faintly apparent in as scattered and 2 rural a society as Wales. The revival of classical learning emphasised anew the educational qualities required of administrators and all useful members of the state and which were also to be expected of gentlemen. At a time of social change, in Wales as in England, education became a 3 means of asserting and of reinforcing social distinctions. Neither the schools nor the universities were particularly suited 4 to the task of preparing young gentlemen. The newer grammar schools tried tEadapt, and there were a few signs that the universities and the inns of court, though still largely institutions of professional instruction, made some concessions towards providing a more general and 5 popular education. The essential conservatism of these places meant 6 that they were not in the van of intellectual progress. Rather, they were places for disseminating received and accepted truths intermixed with north European humanism and religious ideology, giving force to 333. 7 the ideal of wise and moral service and leadership.