The dragon's tongue
Sir: Despite their Celtic kinship the Irish and Welsh are not always notable for mutual affection; I hope Mr lob Davies (Letters, 5 July) will forgive me for suggest- ing that he has not really met Sir Graham Sutton's letter (21 June). Modern Irish in- cludes processes similar to those explained by Mr Davies; yet it is not open in the same way to Sir Graham's criticism. The reason is that the system of Irish ortho- graphy retains enough of the unmutated form to make it recognisable. Either what is commonly called 'aspiration' (more correctly, lenition) occurs, which is represen- ted either by a dot over the letter or a letter 'h' inserted after it (thus, 'c', 'eh); or 'eclipsis', which is represented by writing the new consonant in front of the old initial
consonant, so that the baffled reader can always try his dictionary under the second consonant of the unfamiliar word.
No doubt, the Irish system is even more confusing than the Welsh to those trying to tackle the pronunciation of Irish words with an inadequate knowledge of the language as a whole. But it makes things a lot easier for the stranger who wants to read rather than to speak. This is especially the case with proper names, in which the basic initial is always given the identifying capital. Once it is known that 'Bade Atha Cliath' is Dublin, there is surely no great difficulty in spotting that 'i mBaile Atha Cliath' means 'in Dublin', whereas 'Maile Atha Cliath' might well mystify the simple-minded English.
G. I. Hand
Woodburn, Sydney Avenue, Blackrock, Co. Dublin Sir: I fear that I have not made my point about mutations in written Welsh clear to Mr lob o Davies (Letters, 5 July). The dif- ficulty, for someone trying to learn to read Welsh. lies not in the rules for forming mutations but in the reverse process- that of deciding under which letter one must look up an unfamiliar word in the diction- ary. What is needed is an anti-mutation table, like a table of antilogarithms in mathematics.
I cannot see how the omission of muta- tions in written Welsh would make the lan- guage more difficult, and surely the analogy with case-endings in Latin is quite false. Without any means of distinguishing bet- ween the subject and the object of a verb a Latin text would be full of ambiguities, but mutations have no such effect. To omit mutations would make the language more difficult to pronounce, but their removal from printed Welsh would be a far more effective means of popularising the language than any number of demonstrations.
Graham Sutton
Hafod, Woodend Drive, Sunninghill, Berks.
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