Teasers

[thrashaholic]

I'm personally torn myself. You know, the languages, none of what we can reconstruct (slowly removing the Goidelic and other influences and so on) will ever be 100% accurate. That's the thing with Welsh though; it's the most accurate AROUND. Hence trying to rebuild one that's more accurate. Either way, we can still use the older spellings, the abbreviated letter masses and all that, so the spellings would be the same; they're not...TOO different than modern Welsh, though where words are placed in relation to one another, how adjectives modify things, and a whole slew of grammatical differences, we can still fudge a bit and use modernized pronunciations, because it's really no less accurate than trying to imitate pronunciations that were only vaguely described by Gaelic speakers (much of the basis for Caledonian dialect reconstructions). Alternatively, I could still use the reconstruction for the Caledonian unit, since that's where I'm trying to reconstruct the language of, and just use Welsh pronunciation for the other units (except, of course, Laoch, and Cidainh, which I'm using early Gaelic pronunciation for, Cidainh in Gallic would have probably been more like 'Kid-unk', not 'Sid-ank'). Thoughts?

You clearly have far more experience when it comes to dealing with the Celtic languages than I do, it's just a bit of a hobby for me studying Welsh (because I am Welsh) and to a certain extent Celtic languages as a whole, I don't have this firm grounding in their linguistics as you seem to, so I respect your judgement 100%.

I'm of the opinion though that mordern Welsh pronunciations should be used as these are the only ones we can truly be certain that we've got correct. The range of sounds used won't be that different, and we wouldn't be forced to make educated guesses on the pronunciation like we would with the dead languages. But I can certainly see where you're coming from when it comes to actual words, using modern Welsh words for the Britons is a bit like using modern Italian for Latin. Unfortunately I don't know that much about old Welsh, so I'll leave that to you. In all though I think that modern pronunciations, except for where it's not appropriate/we know otherwise, combined with a more traditional script would produce a fairly realistic compromise.

PS. In answer to your Strathclyder reconstruction, I'm probably not nearly experienced enough to help you, but I'd be very interested in your results if that'd be possible.