A basic guide to Welsh Pronunciation.

[thedivinegoat]

So for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth shanaqui is hosting the FONSFAQ for Wales. (The Prompts and Claims post)

As I am learning Welsh, I offered do a basic welsh post, but before doing that I thought it would probably be helpful to do a guide to pronunciation, given that seems to be one of the things people find scariest about welsh.

Welsh has a different alphabet to English, it has letters that English doesn't (ch, dd etc) and a lot of of the letters that look the same are pronounced differently. (ie u & w). Bwrw, gŵr and sgwd are a lot easier to say when you don't try to pronounce w as in the english alphabet. (In Welsh w is a vowel)

The emphasis also falls in a different place. In any word with two or more syllables the emphasis falls on the penultimate syllable. For instance -

Fron¦cys¦yll¦te
Ys¦trad¦meu¦rig
Caer¦gu¦bi (Because the emphasis falls on the gu, the u is pronounced differently to how it is normally. More as the u in cup is pronounced).

A circumflex (ˆ) on a vowel means you lengthen the sound.

a - mam - as in apple
b - mab
c - car - hard as in cat and cot, not soft as in cereal and celery
ch - chi - as in loch
d - da
dd - dda - th as in the and leather
e - de - open as in men, but not delight
f - saf - v as veil
ff - saff - as in difference
g - gan - always a hard g as in got, not giraffe
ng - ng - as in sing
h - hon
i - ci - as ink or ee in seek, not time
j - garej
l - lan
ll - lle - My text book says “prepare to say l, then blow really hard making a sound like a dentist’s suction pipe, blowing out!” this may or may not be useful to you
m - man
n - ni
o - to, toc as in order and floor, not open
p - pen
ph - phen - as in physics
r - car - as in English but more rolling
rh - rhif - start saying the r and then say the h over it
s - saff - as in English. However si (as in siop) is always pronounced sh unless it is the word si in which case it is pronounced sea
t - ti
th - beth - as in things.
u - un - as in tree, so that pump (welsh for five) is pronounced pimp
w - pwll - as in blue and pool
y - dyn - as in bean
-- - llyn - as in pin
-- - Cymru - as in cup

ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh, and th are one letter in welsh. Which is important if you ever do a welsh crossword.

Comments

[shanaqui]

Which is important if you ever do a welsh crossword.

*laughs*

I knew a lot of this, but some of it was new. Thank you!

[damanique]

This list didn't make much sense to me until I realized the first word after each letter is supposed to be an example of the Welsh word that letter is used in. Perhaps you should clarify this (or maybe I'm an idiot)?

-Edit-
Also it's not clear how to pronounce the 'j'. Right now it's a 'dzj' in my head. :o
And I have no idea what a dentist's suction pipe is supposed to sound like XD

[cxcvi]

My text book says “prepare to say l, then blow really hard making a sound like a dentist’s suction pipe, blowing out!” this may or may not be useful to you

The way I learnt it (as taught by a childrens TV program) is "raise your tongue to the top of you mouth and breath out sideways".

Which is important if you ever do a welsh crossword.

They're also one tile in Welsh Scrabble. The RH tile is worth 10 points, according to the box art. Is it really that rare?

[firecat]

When I was in high school, I had a Welsh language book, and it vastly amused me to write "ffych" somewhere on papers I turned in for class.