I’m slogging through the character names index and a Welsh pronunciation guide for To Carry the Horn (very necessary — sorry to do it to you folks. One of my beta readers is complaining bitterly. I say, could be worse – could be a Russian novel.) This requires me to look up every name and make sure I provide some clue about how to say it. Welsh looks much harder than it is because of unusual spelling conventions. “Gruffydd” is Griffith, “Rhys” is Reece, “Vachan” became Vaughan, and so forth, but there are some genuine problems, too.
To begin with, you can’t just look up Welsh words in a dictionary. Perhaps you didn’t know this… Celtic languages share a phenomenon known as “mutation” and are annoying enough to change the spelling accordingly. This means, when you pronounce a word differently because of the influence of its surrounding words or grammatical syntax, you spell it that way.
We’re used to this in English for vowels in some of our older words, such as our class of strong verbs. We share with other Germanic languages couplets like “run/ran”, “fall/fell”, “know/knew”. Initial letters, on the other hand, rarely do this in English, so it doesn’t seem so bad because we only have a few of them, and the initial letter isn’t involved. It’s different in Welsh.
Let me give you an example. In English, we write “an apple”, but we say “a napple”. In Welsh, they spell it that way, too. So a hypothetical sentence in English, spelled as the Welsh do, might read. “Mary couldn’t decide which apple she wanted, but John gave her a napple she couldn’t resist.”
Got that? How would you look up “napple” in a dictionary? You have to know the language well enough already to understand what might happen so that you can guess what the unmutated form of the word “napple” might be, after you fail to find it. Good luck with that if you’re skipping the grammar and going straight to the vocabulary lists.
In English, we have some other famous examples, both of which demonstrate how this can all go terribly wrong. That little amphibian we call a newt? Sorry, wrong name. It’s actually an eft. At some point circa Middle English, the phrase “an eft” was reanalyzed, incorrectly, as “a neft” which became “a newt.”