38-541: Gofannon ( Welsh pronunciation: [ɡɔˈvanɔn] ) is a Middle Welsh reflex of Gobannus , one of the deities worshipped by the ancient Celts . He features in Middle Welsh literature as a great metal worker and as the son of Dôn . His name can be compared with the Old Irish gobae (gen. gobann ) ‘ smith ’, Middle Welsh / Cornish / Breton gof (pl. gofein ) ‘ smith ’, Gaulish gobedbi ‘with
76-532: A -affection is found, most notably, in the feminine forms of adjectives that do have gender declension, and it changes the stem vowels as follows: Orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language , including norms of spelling , punctuation , word boundaries , capitalization , hyphenation , and emphasis . Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than
114-460: A number of detailed classifications have been proposed. Japanese is an example of a writing system that can be written using a combination of logographic kanji characters and syllabic hiragana and katakana characters; as with many non-alphabetic languages, alphabetic romaji characters may also be used as needed. Orthographies that use alphabets and syllabaries are based on the principle that written graphemes correspond to units of sound of
152-400: A particular style guide or spelling standard such as Oxford spelling . The English word orthography is first attested in the 15th century, ultimately from Ancient Greek : ὀρθός ( orthós 'correct') and γράφειν ( gráphein 'to write'). Orthography in phonetic writing systems is often concerned with matters of spelling , i.e. the correspondence between written graphemes and
190-403: A type of abstraction , analogous to the phonemes of spoken languages; different physical forms of written symbols are considered to represent the same grapheme if the differences between them are not significant for meaning. Thus, a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all functionally equivalent. For example, in written English (or other languages using
228-447: Is a productive alternation between final syllables and non-final syllables known as mutation or centring ( ), which is by necessity triggered by the addition of any suffix and operates as follows: dwg 's/he leads' – dygaf 'I lead' hawl 's/he claims' – holaf 'I claim' marchawg 'horseman' – marchoges 'horsewoman' The centring mutation is due to a process of vowel reduction that operated earlier, in late Brythonic, when
266-531: Is closer to the other medieval Celtic languages, e.g. Old Irish, in its morphology. For example, the endings -wŷs, -ws, -es and -as are used for 3rd person singular of the preterite in Middle Welsh as well as the form -odd . In the same person and tense exists the old reduplicated preterite kigleu 'he heard' of the verb klywet 'to hear', which corresponds to the Old Irish ·cúalae '(s)he heard' from
304-559: Is discussed further at Phonemic orthography § Morphophonemic features . The syllabaries in the Japanese writing system ( hiragana and katakana ) are examples of almost perfectly shallow orthographies—the kana correspond with almost perfect consistency to the spoken syllables, although with a few exceptions where symbols reflect historical or morphophonemic features: notably the use of ぢ ji and づ zu (rather than じ ji and ず zu , their pronunciation in standard Tokyo dialect) when
342-600: Is either i or a , hence the alternations are referred to as i-affection and a-affection . The more common type is i -affection, which occurs in plurals with a zero ending and in the present singular of many verbs. In addition, in some cases, the singular has an affected vowel, but the plural does not (this has been termed 'reversion'). The alternation operates as follows: maen 'stone' – pl. mein safaf 'I stand' – seif 's/he stands' dragon 'dracons' – dreic 'dracon' Saeson 'Saxons' – Seis 'Saxon' corn 'horn' – pl. cyrn gwr 'man' – pl. gwyr Ultimate
380-576: Is placed between slashes ( /b/ , /bæk/ ), and from phonetic transcription , which is placed between square brackets ( [b] , [bæk] ). The writing systems on which orthographies are based can be divided into a number of types, depending on what type of unit each symbol serves to represent. The principal types are logographic (with symbols representing words or morphemes), syllabic (with symbols representing syllables), and alphabetic (with symbols roughly representing phonemes). Many writing systems combine features of more than one of these types, and
418-562: Is predictable: vowels are long in monosyllables unless followed by a geminate or one of the consonants /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , /m/ , /ŋ/ or a geminate. The vowels could combine into the following falling diphthongs: 1. ending in /w/ : /aw/ , /ew/ , /iw/ , /ɨw/ ~ /əw/ 2. ending in /ɨ/ : /aɨ/ , /oɨ/ , /uɨ/ 3. others: /ej/ , /eʉ/ (and possibly /æj/ , /æʉ/ ) The diphthongs /æj/ and /æʉ/ , whose first component gradually changed into /a/ , were originally allophones of /ej/ and /eʉ/ , respectively, and no distinction between
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#1732797264082456-749: Is the language of nearly all surviving early manuscripts of the Mabinogion , although the tales themselves are certainly much older. It is also the language of most of the manuscripts of mediaeval Welsh law . Middle Welsh is reasonably intelligible, albeit with some work, to a modern-day Welsh speaker. The phonology of Middle Welsh is quite similar to that of modern Welsh, with only a few differences. The letter u , which today represents /ɨ/ in North Western Welsh dialects and /i/ in South Welsh and North East Welsh dialects, represented
494-529: Is usually written, in contrast to Modern Welsh: e.g. mwnwgyl rather than mwnwgl "neck". In general, the spelling is both variable and historical and does not reflect some sound changes that had taken place by the Middle Welsh period, most notably the lenition. Some of the less predictable letter-sound correspondences are the following: /β/ /w/ /w/ (hence ⟨wy⟩ for /wɨ/ ) /ə/ (elsewhere, reflecting mutation – see below) /j/ (between consonants and vowels) /i/ (occasionally; in
532-650: The Latin alphabet ), there are two different physical representations (glyphs) of the lowercase Latin letter a : ⟨a⟩ and ⟨ɑ⟩ . Since the substitution of either of them for the other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, which can be written | a | . The italic and boldface forms are also allographic. Graphemes or sequences of them are sometimes placed between angle brackets, as in | b | or | back | . This distinguishes them from phonemic transcription, which
570-700: The caron on the letters | š | and | č | , which represent those same sounds in Czech ), or the addition of completely new symbols (as some languages have introduced the letter | w | to the Latin alphabet) or of symbols from another alphabet, such as the rune | þ | in Icelandic. After the classical period, Greek developed a lowercase letter system with diacritics to enable foreigners to learn pronunciation and grammatical features. As pronunciation of letters changed over time,
608-558: The close central rounded vowel /ʉ/ in Middle Welsh. The diphthong aw is found in unstressed final syllables in Middle Welsh, while in Modern Welsh it has become o (e.g. Middle Welsh marchawc = Modern Welsh marchog "horseman"). Similarly, the Middle Welsh diphthongs ei and eu have become ai and au in final syllables, e. g. Middle Welsh seith = modern saith "seven", Middle Welsh heul = modern haul "sun". The vowels are as follows: Vowel length
646-436: The phonemes found in speech. Other elements that may be considered part of orthography include hyphenation , capitalization , word boundaries , emphasis , and punctuation . Thus, orthography describes or defines the symbols used in writing, and the conventions that regulate their use. Most natural languages developed as oral languages and writing systems have usually been crafted or adapted as ways of representing
684-484: The smiths ’, all of which are cognate with Lithuanian gabija ‘sacred home fire’, gabus ‘gifted, clever’. His apparent counterpart in Irish mythology , Goibniu , in addition to his duties as a smith , also takes on the role of a divine hero who brewed an ale of immortality, in addition to being an architect and builder. In Welsh mythology , Gofannon killed his nephew, Dylan Ail Don , not knowing who he was. One of
722-402: The 3rd person possessive y and the negative particle ny ) /ɨ/ (only word-finally; especially in early texts) /ə/ (non-word-finally; especially in early texts) /ej/ (elsewhere) /eʉ/ (elsewhere) /β/ (medially and word-finally) (rarely /ð/ ) /r̥/ /d/ /ŋ/ (occasionally) /b/ (postvocalically) /d/ (postvocalically) /ɡ/ (postvocalically) Middle Welsh
760-467: The character is a voicing of an underlying ち or つ (see rendaku ), and the use of は, を, and へ to represent the sounds わ, お, and え, as relics of historical kana usage . Korean hangul and Tibetan scripts were also originally extremely shallow orthographies, but as a representation of the modern language those frequently also reflect morphophonemic features. An orthography based on a correspondence to phonemes may sometimes lack characters to represent all
798-430: The correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are highly complex or inconsistent is called a deep orthography (or less formally, the language is said to have irregular spelling ). An orthography with relatively simple and consistent correspondences is called shallow (and the language has regular spelling ). One of the main reasons why spelling and pronunciation diverge is that sound changes taking place in
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#1732797264082836-544: The end of a word, where it is spelled with an f (in Modern Welsh, it is always spelled with a f , e.g. Middle Welsh auall = modern afall "apple tree"). The sound /ð/ is usually spelled with a d (in Modern Welsh, it is spelled with a dd , e.g. Middle Welsh dyd = modern dydd "day"). The sound /r̥/ is spelled r and is thus not distinguished from /r/ (in Modern Welsh, they are distinguished as rh and r respectively, e.g. Middle Welsh redec "running" vs. modern rhedeg ). The epenthetic vowel /ə/
874-487: The letters t c at the end of a word, e.g. diffryt "protection" (modern diffryd ), redec "running" (modern rhedeg ). The sound /k/ is very often spelled k before the vowels e i y (in Modern Welsh, it is always spelled with a c , e.g. Middle Welsh keivyn = modern ceifn "third cousin"). The sound /v/ is usually spelled with a u or v (these are interchangeable as in Latin MSS), except at
912-539: The phonemic distinctions in the language. This is called a defective orthography . An example in English is the lack of any indication of stress . Another is the digraph | th | , which represents two different phonemes (as in then and thin ) and replaced the old letters | ð | and | þ | . A more systematic example is that of abjads like the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, in which
950-461: The post-stress syllable, reflecting the earlier final stress of the late Brythonic period, since this persists even in Modern Welsh. The orthography of Middle Welsh was not standardised, and there is great variation between manuscripts in how certain sounds are spelled. Some generalisations of differences between Middle Welsh spelling and Modern Welsh spelling can be made. For example, the possessive adjectives ei "his, her", eu "their" and
988-532: The preposition i "to" are very commonly spelled y in Middle Welsh, and are thus spelled the same as the definite article y and the indirect relative particle y . A phrase such as y gath is therefore ambiguous in Middle Welsh between the meaning "the cat" (spelled the same in Modern Welsh), the meaning "his cat" (modern ei gath ), and the meaning "to a cat" (modern i gath ). The voiced stop consonants /d ɡ/ are represented by
1026-552: The short vowels are normally left unwritten and must be inferred by the reader. When an alphabet is borrowed from its original language for use with a new language—as has been done with the Latin alphabet for many languages, or Japanese katakana for non-Japanese words—it often proves defective in representing the new language's phonemes. Sometimes this problem is addressed by the use of such devices as digraphs (such as | sh | and | ch | in English, where pairs of letters represent single sounds), diacritics (like
1064-438: The spoken language are not always reflected in the orthography, and hence spellings correspond to historical rather than present-day pronunciation. One consequence of this is that many spellings come to reflect a word's morphophonemic structure rather than its purely phonemic structure (for example, the English regular past tense morpheme is consistently spelled -ed in spite of its different pronunciations in various words). This
1102-592: The spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g. would and should ); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster 's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g. honor and honour ). Orthographic norms develop through social and political influence at various levels, such as encounters with print in education,
1140-440: The spoken language. The rules for doing this tend to become standardized for a given language, leading to the development of an orthography that is generally considered "correct". In linguistics , orthography often refers to any method of writing a language without judgement as to right and wrong, with a scientific understanding that orthographic standardization exists on a spectrum of strength of convention. The original sense of
1178-538: The spoken language: phonemes in the former case, and syllables in the latter. In virtually all cases, this correspondence is not exact. Different languages' orthographies offer different degrees of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. English , French , Danish , and Thai orthographies, for example, are highly irregular, whereas the orthographies of languages such as Russian , German , Spanish , Finnish , Turkish , and Serbo-Croatian represent pronunciation much more faithfully. An orthography in which
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1216-421: The stress was placed on the last syllable. Further, there are two types of alternations that are caused by following vowels (extant or lost) and are no longer entirely productive, but nonetheless very frequent in the morphology. The first type is ultimate affection , which occurs in the last syllable of a word and is caused by a vowel that used to be located in the next syllable. The originally triggering vowel
1254-508: The tasks given to Culhwch if he were to win the hand of Olwen was to get Gofannon to sharpen his brother Amaethon 's plough. Middle Welsh Middle Welsh ( Welsh : Cymraeg Canol , Middle Welsh: Kymraec ) is the label attached to the Welsh language of the 12th to 15th centuries, of which much more remains than for any earlier period. This form of Welsh developed directly from Old Welsh ( Welsh : Hen Gymraeg ). Middle Welsh
1292-404: The thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. The consonants are as follows: Consonants may be geminate. /ʃ/ is mostly found in loanwords such as siacet 'jacket'. Stress was placed on the penultimate syllable with some exceptions such as the causative verbs in -háu , e.g. sicrháu ('to make things secure' from sicr ' secure'). In terms of intonation, the tonal peak must have been aligned with
1330-588: The two was expressed in Middle Welsh spelling, so their presence during most of Middle Welsh is not immediately observable. However, the fact that the modern pronunciations beginning with an /a/ occur in all word-final syllables, regardless of stress, makes it plausible that their distinctness from /ej/ and /eʉ/ was a legacy from the time before the stress shifted from final to penultimate syllables in Old Welsh. The full opening to /aj/ and /aʉ/ may have been completed at some point in later Middle Welsh, possibly
1368-456: The verb ro·cluinethar '(s)he hears'. Middle Welsh also retains more plural forms of adjectives that do not appear in modern Welsh, e.g. cochion , plural of coch 'red'. The nominal plural ending -awr is very common in Middle Welsh, but has been replaced in modern Welsh by -au . Like modern Welsh, Middle Welsh exhibits in its morphology numerous vowel alternations as well as the typical Insular Celtic initial consonant mutations. There
1406-536: The word, though, implies a dichotomy of correct and incorrect, and the word is still most often used to refer specifically to a standardized prescriptive manner of writing. A distinction is made between emic and etic viewpoints, with the emic approach taking account of perceptions of correctness among language users, and the etic approach being purely descriptive, considering only the empirical qualities of any system as used. Orthographic units, such as letters of an alphabet , are conceptualized as graphemes . These are
1444-699: The workplace, and the state. Some nations have established language academies in an attempt to regulate aspects of the national language, including its orthography—such as the Académie Française in France and the Royal Spanish Academy in Spain. No such authority exists for most languages, including English. Some non-state organizations, such as newspapers of record and academic journals , choose greater orthographic homogeneity by enforcing
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