Welsh pronunciation for English speakers

[lareinemisere]

I come seeking help once more with the roleplaying game I'm translating (French > English). I've hit the appendices, which include a section advising on the pronunciation of the many Welsh words in the main text. I'm going to need to amend this section quite a bit, rather than just translating the original straight, since it is written based on the

Comments

[muckefuck]

Quick question: Is the audience for this publication primarily from the UK? I'm assuming so on the basis of the Birmingham reference.

You have the pronunciation of dd wrong. It's a "soft th" as in this or lithe (IPA [ð]). Wy is actually a falling diphthong in many words (i.e. IPA [ʊi] [South], [ʊɨ] [North]). I don't know where you got the pronunciation you did for ywy. Ts is not pronounced "sh" except colloquially in lenition position (e.g. dy tsips "your chips"). In initial position, it is generally "ch" (i.e. IPA [ʧ]).

ETA: Ng represents the sound in "finger" (IPA [ŋg]) only in certain circumstances, generally where two words comes together to forma a compound (e.g. Llangynfarch). Otherwise it's a simple [ŋ] as in "singer".

[lareinemisere]

The biggest market for RPGs is the US, but the publisher of the translation is British and I've been told to use British spelling and not to over-Americanise vocab (e.g. I'm translating 'cidre' as 'cider' not 'hard cider'). On reflection, it seems that the Birmingham reference won't help the average British reader all that much either, given that I appear to have made a complete dog's breakfast of that diphthong despite formerly living in Brum for almost a decade, so I think I'm just going to scratch that comparison altogether

[muckefuck]

Ywy = ui is a direct lift from a Welsh/English pronunciation guide I found online

Do you have a link for that? Finding an existing guide for British English speakers (and modifying it somewhat so as not to run afoul of copyright) is probably your best bet overall, but unfortunately a lot of them are mediocre.

I think the simplest explanation for the diphthongs is that they're combinations of the sounds represents by the two letters involved. So ew is e plus w, just as mawr (as you correctly state) consists of a plus w. English speakers have difficulty making close vowels pure, so telling them simply to use the open ones throughout (as you have done for e and o) is on balance the safest approach.

I'm kind of mystified why ts is even on a list like this in the first place, given that it's found only in very recent English borrowings. (The earlier convention was to use si [i.e. [ʃ]], e.g. sies "chess", siart "chart".) But maybe it's just my unwarranted bias that if Welsh is involved, it must be historical fantasy.

[lareinemisere]

I agree about the finding-and-modifying, which is pretty much what I did (Happily, I know a lot more about IP law than I do about Welsh!). I don't have the link for the site I ran across, but it was a walking website, not a specialist language one, something like go4awalk.com. It came pretty high up the rankings when I did a Google search for Welsh pronunciation guides, so I hoped it was a decent one. With the exception of my nightmare with 'ew', the combination of the English and French explanations meant that I thought I could 'hear' most of the sounds being aimed at...but I also knew I'd be safest asking people here to check my working, as it were.

As to why ts is on the list, my guess is that the French author also doesn't speak any Welsh and sought out similar (modern) lists, perhaps in English as well as French. She'll likely have been working on the basis that further Welsh words would be needed in the supplements to the Core Rule Book, and thus included various 'foreign' sounds that haven't shown up yet, in case they're

[muckefuck]

That far back, you're not even talking about "Welsh" per se but what linguists call "Late Common Brittonic". The earliest attestations of Welsh don't appear until the 8th century, and the language is significantly different from the Welsh of later days. I'm curious now what spellings she's used: Modern Welsh, Middle Welsh (the language of the Mabinogi), or something else entirely.

Were you going to include any pointers on stress? Up through the mediaeval period, it's final. But then there's a shift to the penult, although with high pitch remaining on the final syllable. This is what gives Modern Welsh its distinctive lilt (much mocked in imitations of Welsh English).

[lareinemisere]

Hard to say (since I know so little about Welsh). She's more a historian than a linguist, and there is something of a tendency in RPGs to grab things from whichever point in the timeline makes for a good setting and mash them together, so the Welsh words may be similarly mixed. Having put a couple of dozen into a modern online dictionary, I can find a good handful (things like 'agweddi', 'beirdd' and 'caer'). Several words for things which don't turn up so much in modern reality (eg 'crannag', 'galanas', 'Lloegyr') didn't show up there but do so in a Google search in contexts which would suggest to me they're either modern spellings, or spellings which haven't changed since the relevant era

[muckefuck]

Believe me, I know how this works; I have two RPG credits for the unpaid work I did for SJG. My friends brought me in because they wanted to make sure they hadn't made a hash of the languages involved and they knew I'd willingly do the proofreading just for the satisfaction of having everything be right for a change, goddammit!

Lloegyr is, FWIW, a Middle Welsh form. (The modern spelling is without the y though the pronunciation is basically the same.) Crannag isn't actually Welsh at all but a modern Scottish Gaelic form of Middle Irish crannóc. So you're right, it's typical RPG pick-a-mix.