Talk:yr euog a ffy heb neb yn ei erlid

Pronunciation of ei and eu

@I'm so meta even this acronym: For the pronunciation of ei (“his, her”), see e.g. Gareth King, Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge 1993), p. 82: "These words [ei (“his, her”) and eu (“their”)], despite their spelling, have always been pronounced as [i]. Pronunciations that follow the spelling (giving these words the same sound as in tei or cynlleied), although increasingly heard on the media and at formal occasions, are very affected and should not be imitated. It is much safer always to sound ei and eu as if they were written i." Indeed, in Middle Welsh they were spelled i or y, and I read somewhere that the spelling ei started being used because it was misunderstood as being derived from Latin eius. For the phonemic value of ⟨ei⟩ in other words, see the references at Welsh phonology, especially Jones 1984. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:45, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

@Aɴɢʀ: I repeat that that is absolutely contrary to my experience and that the /ei/ and /eɨ/ pronunciations are certainly not “very affected”; however, you sourced your assertion, so I won't revert you. (Maybe things have changed since King wrote that. I was six at the time, so I am unlikely to have had any memory of a hypercorrect pronunciation beginning to displace an older, more colloquial one.) Re eu- in euog representing the phonemic /əɨ/, whether or not that's the case, it's phonetically realised [eɨ]; why choose the schwa for the phonemic representation, given the non-existence (or at least extreme rarity) of yu: [əɨ] in Welsh? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:04, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: It is entirely possible that things have changed; it's also possible that your dialect is different from the dialects described in the sources I know of. Jones 1984 (listed at the WP article; and if you were 6 in 1993, you weren't born yet in 1984) says that South Welsh /əi̯/ "begins with a slightly fronted central vowel between the half-open and half-close positions and moves in the direction of a close front vowel", which I guess could be transcribed [ə̟i̯]. He (Glyn is a man's name, right?) goes on to say, "Some speakers occasionally realize this glide [by which he means diphthong] with a closer more fronted element having the quality of a centralized half-close [ë]". Maybe that realization is more common now than it was 33 years ago, or more common in your dialect than in the one he's describing. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:18, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

@Aɴɢʀ: Apologies for the long delay in my response. Yes, Glyn is a man's name. To explain my background: I was born in Cardiff, where I lived until I was nine; I then moved to Gwynedd, where I've lived since, apart from about five years spent in Ceredigion. I speak/spoke Welsh frequently in all those places. Accordingly, I am pretty familiar with many of the dialects of those areas. I don't remember hearing -eu- realised as [əɨ] or [əi] by anyone, anywhere. I have heard ei realised as [i] and eu realised as [ɨ], but I've always taken them for colloquial/dialectal pronunciations; ei realised as [ei] and eu realised as [eɨ] are definitely the standard and are more common. I appreciate, since I'm not citing an authority, that my statements lack exactly that; are you persuaded by my playing the native-speaker card? BTW, I rather doubt that the Middle Welsh i was respelt in Modern Welsh as ei because of its mistaken derivation from the Latin eius; analogical alteration after ein (“our”) and eich pl (“your”) seems more likely to me, but what do I know? — I.S.M.E.T.A. 14:54, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

@I'm so meta even this acronym: The trouble with that theory is that King also says that ein and eich are traditionally pronounced /ən/ and /əχ/, so they're not spelled the way they're pronounced either; and in Middle Welsh they were spelled yn and ych. So if anything, they got their spelling under the influence of ei, not the other way round. As for playing the native speaker card, I don't always trust it, because people tend to hear what they expect to hear and forget or not notice when they hear things that deviate from their expectations. I don't even trust my own native-speaker abilities for American English pronunciations, at least not exclusively, but I rely on what dictionaries and phonology reference books have to say. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:02, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

@Aɴɢʀ: Well, isn't that funny? 'Cause I've only ever heard ein and eich pronounced [ein] and [eiχ], respectively. I think the popular belief that Welsh spelling is almost perfectly phonetic guided the change from the historical pronunciations to the spelling pronunciations. Still, I concede that I have no published evidence to present, so I defer to you on this. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 16:00, 9 April 2017 (UTC)