Random Musings (and associated non sequiturs) v. 3.0

Yellow should, by all rights, be uellō.

And most of all I hate queue. If you’re going to spell it like that, then at least have the sense to say it ‘cyooee-ooee’ hahaha.

But in “yellow”, the y sound isn’t a vowel sound. It’s a consonant; it follows the linguistic and phonological rules of a consonant.

Actually, under the rules you started this with, it would be ‘kyooee-ooee’. Which is just as bad.

If you’d like a consonant then I’m afraid the most sensible one would be J… jellō. And I’m pretty sure that’s trademarked :stuck_out_tongue: hahaha. Y as a consonant has the same difficulties in duplication as C and X do; their use cases can immediately be replaced with another letter without changing any pronunciation guides.

Halleluyah -> halleluja. Carrot -> Karrot. Xerxes -> Zerkses.

Irish, Scottish, what’s the third one?

Welsh.

Apparently Cornish and Manx also count, but they’re… well… weirder…

How can anything be weirder than Welsh? And I can’t see how Welsh is considered to be in the same family of languages. Welsh takes the concept of “creative spelling” to whole new heights… on the order of Jupiter-heights.

To be honest with you I don’t know how Welsh counts either, considering it has more in common with Cornish and Breton(ish?) than the others. Especially since the WAL in Cornwall and the WAL in Wales are the same damn WAL.

And no I don’t know what a wal is. Neither does my dictionary :smiley: My fiance suggests that it may actually be linking Cornwall to Wales deliberately, since welsh is an old term for foreign… yeah, at one point in history, anyone who wasn’t English (or Anglo-Saxon at least) was Welsh by definition hahaha.

And Scots Gaelic and Ynglis share a lot of common roots, traits, and even conjugation systems. Ynglis took much more Norse and German into it though, which served to differentiate it substantially enough.

So welsh was originally the English equivalent of the Japanese word gaijin?

Also I think I know what happened with the Welsh language. They traded all their vowels to the Hawaiians in return for most of their consonants.

2 Likes

I suspect that most of Welsh is made up on the spot. Why yes, I will “gwisgwch eich gwregys”…

I tell people that I am part Welsh and part Irish, which explains my spelling. (thank the gods for spellcheck, and dictionary.com)

1 Like

OMG this. As a mainlander it was a tongue twister to pick up town names, and slang terms.

Aiea is a mouthful, never quite figured out if it was three or four syllables. And I never figured out the slang term for black people, I swear it was shorter to say “black guy I don’t like.”

1 Like

Hey, wasn’t I the one who said that a few years ago? :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

Lol, I took a 6-month Welsh course, and I still can’t pronounce half the words. I did get the “ch” = “sound of a cat horking up a hairball” part down, though. :smile:

2 Likes

When I was in Wales, I spoke a few place names, and apparently my pronunciation was very good. :slight_smile: But then, I’ve always been good with accents. I’ve been mistaken for Parisian when I speak French, I’ve been told that my Japanese is very ‘clear’, and when I ran into a couple from a town very close to my home, they didn’t believe me when I told them where I was from, because I sounded too ‘native’. (I’d been in Scotland for a week).

Welsh is a fascinating language.

1 Like

Probably. :smile:

Do journalists take classes on blowing things out of proportion?
One of our main TV channels had a news article with the headline “All Blacks wary of spies at the world cup”.
The article was a video interview a couple of minutes long where one of the questions the interviewer asked was “Are you worried about spies at the world cup” and the answer was “I think it’s against the spirit of the game, but I guess it happens”.

:frowning:

Real journalists don’t.

Their asshat producers who need to drive up eyeball counts and clicks on the website, OTOH…

1 Like

“J Grey Pokery”

My guess was “jiggery-pokery”.

Nope. The Icelandic Vikings stole them. The Icelandic alphabet has 17 vowels, all of which are pronounced differently. Including the two that are interchangeable.

And from the tour guide in Reykjavik: This is a valid and legal sentence in Icelandic. “A a a a”. (With apostrophes over each letter.) Which translates (effectively) to “A man named A owns a sheep.”

1 Like

Trying to steal their dance moves.