Tuesday, July 25, 2017

The problems and pleasures of Welsh. What makes the Welsh language different?

Problem
You learn a word in Welsh. Then you discover another spelling (and pronunciation) of the same word.

Answer
As a speaker of Welsh who lives in Wales explained to me, the reason is that some words change the prefix (which starts the word) changes instead of or as well as the suffix (the letter or syllable or extra word or extra meaning which ends a word).

For example, I was looking at the word before post office. Yn. But I had learned that y=the.

I understood the two Welsh words for the better in relation to the English words a and an . They mean the same thing, but change in front of a vowel. If you learn Latin or Italian, you learn that endings change. In Welsh the start of the words is also like to change.

We do change both prefixes and suffixes in English. We say necessary and unnecessary. That's a change in the prefix, what is fixed before. The word prefix fixes pre before fix.

I find learning another language draws my attention to the structure of English.

Angela Lansbury, teacher of English as a foreign language and learner and teacher of foreign languages.

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