Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

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I noticed that while the website says /kʊtʃ/, wikipedia's page on Welsh orthography suggests that it should be /kʊtχ/ or /kutχ/, Google Translate's automatic audio seems to produce /kotχ/ [not a typo], and the pages on Welsh orthography/phonology together suggest that /tʃ/ should be spelled "ti" [if a following vowel exists, which it doesn't here] or "ts" [regardless of whether a following vowel exists, with examples, both loanwords from English, of "tsips" [chips] and "wats" [watch]].

But I don't know anything more about Welsh than what wikipedia offers. Do you know what's going on with their suggested spelling/pronunciation?

(Wiktionary has /kʊtʃ/ for the pronunciation of the English word "cwtch"; the Welsh word is given with the same pronunciation, but the spelling "cwtsh", which is equally weird as far as the material above goes. The etymology does tend to support /tʃ/ in cwtsh - it's a loan of the English word "couch".)

> it's pronounced more like "cutch" (well, for me it is anyway)

I would have to pronounce "cutch" as /kʌtʃ/. /ʊ/ exists (put / foot / look / nook ...), but there isn't a conventional way to spell it so it's unlikely to be used for unfamiliar words. But /kutʃ/ "benefits" from not being unfamiliar to anyone... and one of the very few things I did know about Welsh is that "w" represents /u/.

> Do you know what's going on with their suggested spelling/pronunciation?

"Cwtch" was/is more common in casual conversation in South Wales (where fluent spoken Welsh is less common, but Welsh words are still used in both English and mixed language contexts). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwtch for a summary of the cross-language context.

In my experience most English dialects don't have a better approximant for "voiceless uvular fricative" and so I don't think it's a terrible clwdge.

I'd expect English speakers to approximate it with /k/ in preference to /ʃ/. (That obviously can't be done when it's following a /t/, but in that case what I'd expect is to just elide the sound completely.)

I've been interested for a long time in the concept of speakers of different languages disagreeing on which sounds in one language match which sounds in the other language. I don't know of any examples, but do you think it's true that Welsh speakers find English /ʃ/ to be a better approximation of Welsh /χ/ than English /k/ is, while English speakers find /k/ to be a better approximation of Welsh /χ/ than /ʃ/ is?

You pose a great question, perhaps complicated by the fact that pretty much Welsh speakers will also have more-or-less native English (if somewhat Cambricised).

Unfortunately I am merely a Q-Celt and not qualified to comment, though I'd love to see an answer from someone else.

I would venture that if there is a difference it may arise from the relative differences in phoneme classifcation that result from the mother tongue (c.f. linguistic relativity of colour perception). It might even be possible to divine some of those differences by looking at tables of regional accents like those you can find on Wikipedia/Wiktionary, e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Welsh_pronunciation

I’ve sometimes wondered if there are any welsh speakers who don’t speak any English at all. My welsh father didn’t learn English until he was about 8, and his mother’s English was extremely rudimentary when she used to speak to me when I visited as a child. This is in a village near Caernarfon where really nobody speaks English on a day to day basis, everything is done in welsh. Naturally nowadays the younger generation is completely native-level in English, just strange to think about that even 70 years ago there were a lot of British people who couldn’t speak English.

Chips generally is sglodion, else just siop chips. I’d include the χ but it’s more like a tsh.

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