> I'm just now getting into studying Welsh. Unfortunately most of the > materials I've found focus on spoken Welsh; this isn't bad, its just that I > would like to learn to read it as well. Among the learning materials there > seems to be a lot of inconsistency regarding spelling. Is this inconsistency > reflected in modern written Welsh? Yes, it is. Because the sound - spelling correspondences are pretty systematic and regular, there's a strong tendency to spell as you speak. I.e. colloquial forms of the spoken language have their own written form, which are quite different from the literary standard. (It's a bit as though in English we could write things like "gonna", "hafta" ad lib, without prior notice, so to speak -- I know some English speakers do sometimes write like that, but it's strange and special in a way that the equivalent isn't in Welsh.) Conversely, as far as the standard written language is concerned, there's a tendency to speak as you spell: a sort of transaccentual spelling pronunciation that gives every letter its full value. It's as though you always read "could not", "I will" aloud as "could not", "I will", not "couldn't", "I'll". Comments, Gymry? ************************ Nigel Love Linguistics Cape Town NLOVE@BEATTIE.UCT.AC.ZA ************************