[Spellyans] Problems with SWF

[Owen Cook]

2008/6/26 Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com> rug scrifa:

>  I don't think we have to mark these, as they can be listed exhaustively. How
>  do you transcribe 'uhel' and 'a-ugh'?

Oh, I think they're just /'iwh at l/ and /@'iwh/, aren't they? (Why the
devil did I leave Archaeologia Britannica in storage?)

(I am taking it that [x] is an allophone of /h/, by the way.)

>>  If <uw> seems too letter-heavy, perhaps a diacritic is necessary?
>
>  <uwnyversyta>? <uwsya>? This would lead to another divergence from the SWF
>  (and from UC, UCR, and KK) for little yield. Using the circumflex treads
>  more lightly.

It fixes an inconsistency. I like the way <uw> looks in 'uwsya', but
if nobody else agrees with me, fair enough. There is still the option
of <ú> or <ü>. But actually, now that I think about it, all of the <û>
we use for /u:/ is non-initial, no? Can we not say that as a rule
initial <û> represents some species of [iu], be it /ju/ or /iw/?

Gendall writes the following words with <iu>:

ûnya, ûnyon, ûnita, ûniversal, ûniversalita, ûniversita
ûrnel (urinal)
ûs, ûsadow, ûsya*, ûsys*, ûsyans~ûjyans
ûsurpya

(My KS-based spellings, by the way, not his. I've omitted his English
dialect words.)

The items marked with an asterisk are attested in Lhuyd with [iu] or
[Iu] (i.e. <iu.> or <yu.>). If the [iu] thing can be believed for the
other items too, we have a reasonably important set here. In any case,
it is necessary to keep these separate from other words beginning with
<u>, like uvel, ugans, ufern, udn, which simply fall in with /i/ in
Late Cornish.

Oll an gwelha,
~~Owen