Welsh Orthography - History

History

The earliest samples of written Welsh date from the 6th century and are in the Latin alphabet (see Old Welsh). The orthography differs from that of modern Welsh particularly in the use of p, t and c to represent the voiced plosives /b, d, ɡ/ in the middle and at the end of words. Similarly, the voiced fricatives /v, ð/ were written with b and d.

By the Middle Welsh period, this had given way to much variability: although b, d and g were now used to represent /b, d, ɡ/, these sounds were also often written as in Old Welsh, while /v/ could be denoted by u, v, f or w. In earlier manuscripts, moreover, fricatives were often not distinguished from plosives (e.g. t for /θ/, the sound now written with th). The grapheme k was also used more commonly than in the modern alphabet, particularly before front vowels. The disuse of this letter is at least partly due to the publication of William Morgan's Welsh Bible, whose English printers, with type letter frequencies set for English and Latin, did not have enough k letters in their type cases to spell every /k/ sound as k, so the order went "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth"; this was not liked at the time, but has become standard usage.

In 1928 a committee chaired by Sir John Morris-Jones standardised the orthography of modern Welsh.

In 1987, a committee chaired by Professor Stephen J. Williams made further small changes. The conventions established by these committees are not adhered to by all modern writers.