From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Jan 15 2004 - 16:20:52 EST
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
> >For Breton, I don't agree with you.
>
> Do you not? The practice is rare, but is
> sometimes used in placenames, as for instance,
> "Inis gWenva" written. (Gosh, look. A fact.)
>
> >Words starting by the trigraph letter <c'h> are rare in Breton
>
> Like the pronoun "c'hwi" 'you" or the digit
> "c'hwec'h" 'six'. (Wow. Another fact.)
Look at this page to find why this happens:
http://www.kervarker.org/fr/grammar_01_kemmadur.html
By "rare" I mean words without mutation of the leading consonnant.
The same number above would be "kwec'h" without the mutation... Typical
breton dictionnaries will list the word only at K, and not at C'H (in fact
the prefered Breton sorting order generally orders C'H between K and L, and
GW between W and X).
Well I know little bribes of Breton, and only in one of the four main
variants. These rules may not be true for all the four variants, and there
are also several orthographic systems used for each of these 4 variants.
Depending on the source, you'll find one orthographic system used by some
Breton authors, and some other used by Breton out of Britanny (in US and
Canada notably), and some other used by breton linguists working at the
University of Rennes (Rhoazhon) or Quimper (Kemper).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jan 15 2004 - 17:01:46 EST