Product Code Database
Welsh orthography uses 29 letters (including eight digraphs) of the Latin script to write native Welsh language words as well as established loanwords.
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The traditional names of the letters are a, bi, èc, èch, di, èdd, e, èf, èff, èg, èng, aets, i, je, èl, èll, èm, èn, o, pi, ffi (yff), èr, rhi, ès, ti, èth, u, w, y.Brake, P. and Brake, J. (2020), Welsh in 12 Weeks, pp. 5–6.Morris-Jones, J. (1922), An Elementary Welsh Grammar, p. 1. In South Wales, where the letters i and u are pronounced identically, they are distinguished as i-dot and u-bedol (bedol means "horseshoe"). Thus the television channel S4C is pronounced ès pedwar èc. Informally, another way of saying the letters is often used, adding the sound ɘ after stop consonants and simply pronouncing the others: a, by, cy, ch, dy, dd, and so on.
In a Welsh dictionary, the Welsh order of letters is strictly observed, so that cyngor 'council' is found before cyhyrog 'muscular', and lori 'lorry' is found before llaeth 'milk'.
Welsh orthography makes use of multiple , which are primarily used on vowels, namely the acute accent (acen ddyrchafedig), the grave accent (acen ddisgynedig), the circumflex (acen grom, to bach, or hirnod) and the diaeresis (didolnod). They are considered variants of their base letter, i.e. they are not
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/ref> Those words are spelled according to Welsh spelling conventions, for example: bws "bus", bwc "", bwced "bucket", car "car", nogin "", gob "", slogan "slogan", fflanel "flannel", trwnt "truant", and gêl/geol/jael/jêl/siêl "gaol".
The letters ⟨k, q, v, x, z⟩ are not part of the Welsh Alphabet. However, these letters are used in foreign proper names and their derivatives: Kantaidd, Zwinglïaidd. They are also sometimes used in technical and other specialized terms, like kilogram, queer, volt and zero, but in all cases can be, and often are, nativised: cilogram, cwiar, folt and sero.Thomas, Peter Wynn (1996) Gramadeg y Gymraeg. Cardiff: University of Wales Press: 757.
By the Middle Welsh period, this had given way to quite a bit of variability: Although were now used to represent , these sounds were also often written as in Old Welsh, while could be denoted by . In earlier manuscripts, moreover, fricatives were often not distinguished from (e.g. for , now written ).Evans, Simon D. (1964) A Grammar of Middle Welsh. Dublin: ColourBooks Ltd. The grapheme was also used, unlike in the modern alphabet, particularly before . The disuse of this letter is at least partly due to the publication of William Salesbury's Welsh New Testament and William Morgan's Welsh Bible, whose English printers, with type letter frequencies set for English and Latin, did not have enough letters in their type cases to spell every as , so the order went "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth";
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> English and Welsh, an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien this was not liked at the time, but has become standard usage.
In this period, (capital ) was also used interchangeably with , such as the passage in the 1567 New Testament: A Dyw y sych ymaith yr oll ðeigre o ddiwrth y llygeid, which contains both and . Elsewhere, the same word is spelt in different ways, e.g. newy dd and newy ð..
The printer and publisher Lewis Jones, one of the co-founders of italic = no, the Welsh-speaking settlement in Patagonia, favoured a limited spelling reform which replaced Welsh and with and , and from circa 1866 to 1886 Jones employed this innovation in a number of newspapers and periodicals he published and/or edited in the colony. However, the only real relic of this practice today is the Patagonian placename Trevelin ("mill town"), which in standard Welsh orthography would be Trefelin.
In 1928, a committee chaired by Sir John Morris-Jones standardised the orthography of modern Welsh.
In 1987, a committee chaired by Professor Stephen J. Williams made further small changes, introducing . Not all modern writers adhere to the conventions established by these committees.Thomas, Peter Wynn (1996) Gramadeg y Gymraeg. Cardiff: University of Wales Press: 749.
| ! Letter ! Name ! Corresponding sounds ! English approximation | |||
| a | a | f ather (long) | |
| b | bi | bat | |
| c | èc | case | |
| ch | èch | No English equivalent; similar to lo ch in Scots, but pronounced further back. | |
| dThe sequence si indicates when followed by a vowel; similarly, di and ti sometimes indicate and respectively when followed by a vowel, although these sounds are spelled j and ts in loanwords like jẁg "jug" and wats "watch". | di | day | |
| dd | èdd | these | |
| e | e | b ed (short) / closest to h ey (long) | |
| f | èf | o f | |
| ff | èff | four | |
| g | èg | gate | |
| ng | èng | thi ng | |
| hIn addition to representing the phoneme , h indicates voicelessness in the mh, nh, and ngh. | aets | hat | |
| i | i, i dot (S) | b it (short) / mach ine (long) / yes (as consonant; before vowels) | |
| j | je | jump (only found in loanwords, usually from English but still in wide use such as jeli ('jelly', ) and jîns ('jeans', ) | |
| l | èl | lad | |
| ll | èll | not present in English; a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. A bit like what the consonant cluster "hl" would sound like. | |
| m | èm | mat | |
| n | èn | net | |
| o | o | Short, like "b og" in RP; long like d awn in RP or st ove in Scottish English | |
| p | pi | pet | |
| phThe digraph ph – which indicates the Welsh morphology of p (e.g. ei phen-ôl) – may also be found very occasionally in words derived from Greek language (e.g. Pharo), although most words of Greek origin are spelt with ff (e.g. ). | ffi | phone | |
| r | èr | Rolled R | |
| rh | rhi | Voiceless rolled R | |
| s | ès | sat | |
| t | ti | s tick | |
| th | èth | thin | |
| u | u (N), u bedol (S) | (N),In the North, the letters u and y are occasionally pronounced , the same as in the South, rather than . This is usually the case when the preceding vowel is or when y is preceded or followed by g or followed by w , forming a diphthong. (S) | for Southern variants: b it (short) / mach ine (long); in Northern dialects not found in English. Identical to "î" and "â" in Romanian, and similar to the "e" in English ros es. |
| w | w | p ush (short) / p ool (long) / wet (as consonant) | |
| yThe vowel letter y indicates in unstressed monosyllabic words (e.g. y "the", fy "my") or non-final syllables (regardless of whether these are stressed or not), but (N) or (S) in word-final syllables (again, regardless of stress). | ỳ | (N), (S) | for Southern variants: b it (final syllable, short) / mach ine (final syllable, long) above (other places, short) / ros es , found in certain dialects of English that differentiate "Rosa's" and "roses", for example, General American. |
The circumflex (ˆ) is mostly used to mark vowel length, so â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ, ŷ are always long. However, not all long vowels are marked with a circumflex, so the letters a, e, i, o, u, w, y with no circumflex do not necessarily represent short vowels; see .
The grave accent (`) is sometimes used, usually in words borrowed from another language, to mark vowels that are short when a long vowel would normally be expected, e.g. pas (a cough), pàs (a pass/permit or a lift in a car); mwg (smoke), mẁg (a mug).
The acute accent (´) is sometimes used to mark a stressed final syllable in a polysyllabic word. Thus the words gwacáu (to empty) and dicléin (decline) have final stress. However, not all polysyllabic words with final stress are marked with the acute accent (Cymraeg "Welsh" and ymlaen "forward/onward", for example, are written with none). The acute may also be used to indicate that a letter w represents a vowel where a glide might otherwise be expected, e.g. gẃraidd (two syllables) "manly", as opposed to gwraidd (one syllable) "root".
Similarly, the diaeresis (¨) is used to indicate that two adjoining vowels are to be pronounced separately (not as a diphthong). However, it is also used to show that the letter i is used to represent the sequence which is always followed by another vowel, e.g. copïo (to copy) pronounced , not .
The grave and acute accents in particular are very often omitted in casual writing, and the same is true to a lesser extent of the diaeresis. The circumflex, however, is usually included. Accented vowels are not considered distinct letters for the purpose of collation.
In all dialects, only stressed vowels may be long; unstressed vowels are always short.
An unmarked (stressed) vowel is long:
An unmarked vowel is short:
The vowel y, when it is pronounced , is always short even when it appears in an environment where other vowels would be long: cyfan (whole) . When pronounced as a close vowel or near-close vowel ( or in the North, or in the South), y follows the same rules as other vowels: dydd (day) (North) ~ (South), gwynt (wind) (North) ~ (South).
Before l, m, n, and r, unmarked vowels are long in some words and short in others:
(The last four examples are given in South Welsh pronunciation only since vowels in nonfinal syllables are always short in North Welsh.)
Before nn and rr, vowels are always short: onn (ash trees), ennill (to win), carreg (stone).
In Northern dialects, long vowels are stressed and appear in the final syllable of the word. Vowels in non-final syllables are always short. In addition to the rules above, a vowel is long in the North before a consonant cluster beginning with s: tyst (witness). Before ll, a vowel is short when no consonant follows the ll: gwell (better) It is long when another consonant does follow the ll: gwallt (hair).
In Southern dialects, long vowels may appear in a stressed syllable as well as in a stressed word-final syllable. Before ll, a stressed vowel in the last syllable can be either long (e.g. gwell "better" ) or short (e.g. twll "hole" ). However, a stressed vowel in the penult before ll is always short: dillad (clothes). Before s, a stressed vowel in the last syllable is long, as mentioned above, but a stressed vowel in the penult is short: mesur (measure) . Vowels are always short before consonant clusters: sant (saint), gwallt (hair), tyst (witness).
Collation is done in correspondence with the alphabet. For example, la comes before ly, which comes before lla, which comes before ma. Automated sorting may occasionally be complicated by the fact that additional information may be needed to distinguish a genuine digraph from a juxtaposition of letters; for example llom comes after llong (in which the ng stands for ) but before llongyfarch (in which n and g are pronounced separately as ).
Although the digraphs above are considered to be single letters, only their first component letter is capitalised when a word in lower case requires an initial capital letter. Thus:
The status of the digraphs as single letters is reflected in the stylised forms used in the logos of the National Library of Wales (logo) and Cardiff University (logo).
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