Welsh Alphabet Notes
I found an explanation of the Welsh alphabet on Wikibooks and I’ll be taking notes here. :] Website
Welsh is still written with the Latin alphabet but there are a few sounds and letters we don’t have as well as some differences with letters we think we know!
a,b,d,e,g,h,i,j,l,m,n,o,p,s,t - pronounced the same
c - 'cat’ (not, never, uh-uh no way, c as in ‘celebrate’)
ch - ‘loch’, we don’t have a sound like this! This is the hard ch sound heard in the word 'loch' or German 'ich'
dd - 'rather’, a hard sound
f - ‘very’, (Yr Wyddor Gymraeg mentions that we have this concept for f in ‘of’)
ff - 'fall’, how English speakers would typically pronounce f
ng - ‘long’, a letter in its own right but sounds exactly how you pronounce it in English
ll - another one we don’t have a sound for, this one is tough. On Yr Wyddor Gymraeg they say:
“sounded by placing the tongue so as to say 'l' and hissing out of one side of the mouth”
ph - ‘fall’, also like the English typical f sound
r - trilled and always pronounced!
rh - r with aspiration Yr Wyddor Gymraeg says:
the difference between 'rh' and 'r' is similar to that between 'wh' and 'w' in "when" and "went"
u - ‘bin’ or ‘bean’ reminds me of the word ‘been’ which can be pronounced either way
w - ‘weather’ or ‘foot’ or ‘root’
y - ‘bin’ or ‘bean’, again reminds me of ‘been'
All consonants sound the same no matter where they are in a word and the same is mostly true for vowels as well.