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dd"th" (voiced) as in "the" (never the voiceless "th" sound as in "thin, e.g., "bedd"

I think it is things like that that make Welsh have a bad rap for pronunciation. THat alone could really screw up an english speaker trying to pasre a Welsh word. In English a dd rounds out the sound, like in Rudd or addage. In Welsh it apparently is just a completely different sound altogether.

So their example of "bedd" to an english speaker would be like Bed, but with a more pronounced "D" in Welsh it would be Beth with the th more like in the.

Just weird. :tongue:
Welsh, and to a much greater degree Gaelic aren’t really transliterated at all. It’s like reading the Iliad where all the proper names use the Greek Alphabet.
 
It is a completely different sound. But the one that really makes English speakers trip up is ll. An aspirated 'l' which does not occur in English, sounded by placing the tongue so as to say 'l' and hissing out of one side of the mouth, e.g., "llan"

The easiest way to 'fake' this sound is with a K. But that's not quite right.

Between that and ch, a non-English sound as in Scottish "ch" in "loch", e.g., "bach", people who don't know the rules of the Welsh alphabet can really trip up.

But, once you know those rules and the pronunciations for the letters, they are absolutely consistent. Unlike English, where it's I before E. Unless we feign agreeing, but this foreign poltergeist of a rule is neither efficient nor smart- and therein lies the height of the issue. It's as if an ancient deity has deigned to influence the zeitgeist of the people. We must remove the weight of this veil from their eyes, and forfeit the obeisance of this weird and heinous rule from our science and leisure alike.
English is one of the hardest languages to learn because the pronunciation is so fucked up. I never said the pronunciation of the Celtic languages was inconsistent. I said the people who decided how they should be transliterated deserve their own special Hell, because they really didn’t bother. :grin:
 
It is a completely different sound. But the one that really makes English speakers trip up is ll. An aspirated 'l' which does not occur in English, sounded by placing the tongue so as to say 'l' and hissing out of one side of the mouth, e.g., "llan"

The easiest way to 'fake' this sound is with a K. But that's not quite right.

Between that and ch, a non-English sound as in Scottish "ch" in "loch", e.g., "bach", people who don't know the rules of the Welsh alphabet can really trip up.

But, once you know those rules and the pronunciations for the letters, they are absolutely consistent. Unlike English, where it's I before E. Unless we feign agreeing, but this foreign poltergeist of a rule is neither efficient nor smart- and therein lies the height of the issue. It's as if an ancient deity has deigned to influence the zeitgeist of the people. We must remove the weight of this veil from their eyes, and forfeit the obeisance of this weird and heinous rule from our science and leisure alike.
Italian has a few like that too., the "C" is pronounced as "CH" for example. I get that it will never be a perfect translation. I just though a double D sounding like "Th" was weird.
 
I realize I made an over generalization when lumping them, that was an error. Welsh isn’t the only language that has issues, for example the people who decided how many of the French words would be spelled in English need a strong cudgeling about the head and shoulders.

Still, while the Welsh alphabet does have mostly the same symbols, many of those symbols do express different sounds in English - to a larger degree than most of the Romance and Germanic derived languages. Gaelic even more so.

Nothing personal against the Welsh, I wish we knew more of the Brythonic languages without filtering through Roman and Germanic invaders.
Go read the article I linked. Then go and ponder what one thousand four hundred years means. And then think about those people who thought about how French words should look when written down were French.

We are the successors to the Roman Empire. And like such delights as square buildings, our calendar, currency, fast food and plumbing, we took our alphabet from Rome.

 
Go read the article I linked. Then go and ponder what one thousand four hundred years means. And then think about those people who thought about how French words should look when written down were French.

We are the successors to the Roman Empire. And like such delights as square buildings, our calendar, currency, fast food and plumbing, we took our alphabet from Rome.


Are you thinking I’m making some form of ’Murica argument? Like those damn Welsh don’t spell things like proper folk? Rofl. I took Latin in High School and College, as well as Japanese, Greek and Lingustics in general. I know where the symbols come from.

Than has nothing to do with deciding that Welsh ”dd” should be written in English as “dd“, or that Gaelic “fh“ which can be silent is still written down at all.

It’s the transliteration that is the problem. Take a language with a completely different script and usually transliterations are made properly. Take two languages that both use Roman Script and you have problems. French has more problems than German, Welsh has more issues than French, and Gaelic..fuggeddaboutit.
 

Heh, there’s an Instructor I used to work with that had the thickest Jamaican accent I ever heard. He had a story about a class in England he taught that had people from all over Great Britain. Some of the people could barely understand each other and he had to translate. People in America talk about thick accents of other Americans, they have no idea what an accent is.
 
Heh, there’s an Instructor I used to work with that had the thickest Jamaican accent I ever heard. He had a story about a class in England he taught that had people from all over Great Britain. Some of the people could barely understand each other and he had to translate. People in America talk about thick accents of other Americans, they have no idea what an accent is.
Noo Doot Aboot it eh? (To be fair, that is not a Canadian accent from any part of Canada I have been to)
Most Canadians have the Seattle or Californian accent
 
My impression as a native speaker of Gaelic who has learned the Welsh alphabet. Welsh has an internally coherent spelling system, we entirely certainly do not. Both are, as CRKrueger CRKrueger said, essentially using the Roman alphabet only in the sense of having the same graphs, but the values assigned are highly divergent from the European "norm".

The reason our spelling system is bad is that we have four versions of each consonant. So in a cluster like "dhe" the h and e only serve to indicate the type of d. They're not spoken, they're metadata.
 
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I had a chance to try pineapple lump-flavoured L&P last night.

I'd drink it if you paid me to, or if I was really thirsty, but not for any other reason.
I like pineapple lumps and I like L&P, but pineapple lump L&P isn't something that really appeals.

On the plus side, I got some Barker's off my mum when they came to Indonesia, so I have Barker's for the first time in the better part of 10 years.
 
You must be mistaken. We Seattlites have no accent.

There was a period of nearly two years where I wasn't able to go back and visit Seattle. When I finally made it, after being in the Midwest so long, most of the NW locals did sound a little funny to my ear. Midwesterners shape their vowels a little differently.
 
There was a period of nearly two years where I wasn't able to go back and visit Seattle. When I finally made it, after being in the Midwest so long, most of the NW locals did sound a little funny to my ear. Midwesterners shape their vowels a little differently.
Have you fixed your mishapenned ear yet?
 
I was born in Athens, Georgia, USA. It's the deep south, but never feels like the deep south because its a college town (the location of the University of Georgia). I'm about an hour from the edge of Atlanta.

I've always lived in Athens, partially because of family (once you have kids it is a bit harder to move away, and I had kids young), and partially just because I love the city. The food scene is good. The music scene is good. People here are generally nice (it has a lot of the Southern hospitality without as many of the downsides usually associated with the south).

Patton Oswalt did a bit when he was here and it isn't actually that off:



I've been a lot of other places for work and vacations. And while I liked a lot of those places, I think Athens will always be home. (Tokyo is amazing though. Holy fuck is that an amazing city).


Harvey Milk are a great Doom band from Athens.
 
Harvey Milk are a great Doom band from Athens.

Athens music scene has really been like, historically punching way over its weight class based on its actual population. So many good bands come from here. (REM, B52s, Widespread Panic for example)

Fun fact: You can still see the ruins of the "Love Shack" from the B52s song. It was an old farmhouse that the singer lived in just outside of town. It burned down in the late 90s iirc.
 
Scot from the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, but I've been living in England for 30 years. Been in Lincoln for the past 20.

Stereotypes: Borders history has been compared to the wild west - raids, rustling and impenetrable family feuds. These days - rugby players and farmers.

(My brother swears that he stopped karate training the day he went to a competition in the Borders. The matches were all pairs of 6'8" farmers, standing toe to toe and punching the shit out of each other's faces until one fell over).

The region's dialect, and the Ulster dialect that derives from it, are the last remaining remnant of original Northumbrian Aenglish. Before that, we spoke Brythonic (old) Welsh. At the meeting point of cultures, there's a surprisingly rich ecclesiastical and monastic history.

Lincolnshire's reputation can be summarised in one word - Innsmouth.
 
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So I have a reasonable education but England was usually only covered in bits and bobs where it interacted with America. But growing up the family next door were English. We played the Avalon Hill version of Kingmaker all the damn time for years. So my geographic knowledge of England is almost completely limited to the cities I assume we're relevant at that time.

No clue where Liverpool is but I Know where Carlisle is!
 
But, once you know those rules and the pronunciations for the letters, they are absolutely consistent. Unlike English, where it's I before E. Unless we feign agreeing, but this foreign poltergeist of a rule is neither efficient nor smart- and therein lies the height of the issue. It's as if an ancient deity has deigned to influence the zeitgeist of the people. We must remove the weight of this veil from their eyes, and forfeit the obeisance of this weird and heinous rule from our science and leisure alike.
I'm fully used to English spelling but it has to be one of the most phonetically inconsistently spelled languages using the Roman alphabet: thought, tough, through.

I read that Finnish is actually the most consistently phonetically spelled: once you know the rules it's immediately clear how something is supposed to be pronounced. Spanish and French are quite consistent, German as well. Dutch not so much.
 
The reason our spelling system is bad is that we have four versions of each consonant. So in a cluster like "dhe" the h and e only serve to indicate the type of d. They're not spoken, they're metadata.

Why not just use accents so Americans could conveniently discard them?
 
So my geographic knowledge of England is almost completely limited to the cities I assume we're relevant at that time.

No clue where Liverpool is but I Know where Carlisle is!
How dare you. Liverpool gave us The Beatles. But other than that the only important parts of England are The Shire and 221b Baker Street.
 
How dare you. Liverpool gave us The Beatles. But other than that the only important parts of England are The Shire and 221b Baker Street.
WereBeetles?
 
I've lived in Colorado Springs, Colorado for more than half my life. But I was born in Massachusetts where I lived until I was 10. Then moved to Guam when my dad transferred there with the U.S. Navy. Spent 3 years there, then back to Massachusetts (Cape Cod) for 3 years. Then Pensacola for a few years (another dad transfer). Then joined the Navy myself and spent my entire 5 years in the military in Virginia (Norfolk and Virginia Beach). Then moved back to Pensacola briefly before moving to Colorado, where I have lived ever since.
 
How dare you. Liverpool gave us The Beatles. But other than that the only important parts of England are The Shire and 221b Baker Street.
One out of three being a real place isn't bad for an American.

Seriously, I had an American point at a map of Britain once and ask me if Scotland was Wales, England.
 
Am I crazy or is this board heavily biased towards the UK and the PNW? Oh and New Zealand
To be fair, there are a couple of Strines as well.

And there's this song ...



Which was a parody of this song ...

 
One out of three being a real place isn't bad for an American.

Seriously, I had an American point at a map of Britain once and ask me if Scotland was Wales, England.
One out of three being a real place isn't bad for an American.

Seriously, I had an American point at a map of Britain once and ask me if Scotland was Wales, England.
That's not too bad. At least they had the right island.
 
Grew up in rural Georgia small town. Moved to an Atlanta suburb when I got married. Moved to a different Georgia small town after the divorce, because apparently both INT and WIS are my dump stats. At least the rent is cheap.
 
I live in a suburb of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in north Texas.

I was born in the town I live in right now, but only moved back here a couple of years to go. I have spent most of my adulthood living in various other towns and regions of Texas.
Which suburb? I live in Plano. Small world.
 
At least the rent is cheap.
I dream of cheap rent. Unfortunately I am obliged to live in commuting distance of London, so that is merely a pipe-dream. My dream is now that Brexit totally screws the British economy with the exception of the London Insurance Market, so the buy-to-let landlords are forced to dump their assets in mortgagee sales and house prices tankadjust back to sustainable levels.

We live in hope.
I totally don't have a dart board with a picture of Phil and Kirsty on my wall.
 
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I dream of cheap rent. Unfortunately I am obliged to live in commuting distance of London, so that is merely a pipe-dream. My dream is now that Brexit totally screws the British economy with the exception of the London Insurance Market, so the buy-to-let landlords are forced to dump their assets in mortgagee sales and house prices tankadjust back to sustainable levels.

We live in hope.
I totally don't have a dart board with a picture of Phil and Kirsty on my wall.
I was chatting to a colleague who lives in London. His flat is 54sqm (Mine's 49). His deposit was higher than the cost of my entire flat.
 
What a small world. I am from Beaumont originally and have been to Orange a hundred times!

Hey, awesome. While I live in OH with my fiance, my entire family lives in either Port Neches, Beaumont, Orange, or Houston.

Man, Beaumont has the best gaming store. The Book Stan, which is just this lovely warehouse of comics, miniatures, and boxes and boxes of RPG books. I have to make at least one trip there every time I visit.
 
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