This fine essay makes me wonder about something that I often had to explain to North American students, how spelling and phonetics began to diverge when it came to British place-names in the 19th century. Robert Adam's sisters spelled what's now known as 'Culzean' Castle in Scotland (which Adam rebuilt in the 1790s) as it's pronounced: 'Cullane'. The village where I live, Brightwalton, was until the early 20th century pronounced, and spelled, 'Brickleton'. These spelling shifts are another manifestation of 19th-century romanticism, though in darker moods I suspect they also served to separate educated sheep from local goats.
A Welsh-speaking friend told me that most bureaucratic Welsh now is obviously produced by Google Translate and that it's almost insulting to see how it's been done as a box-ticking exercise. So I guess that would be the next stage.
This fine essay makes me wonder about something that I often had to explain to North American students, how spelling and phonetics began to diverge when it came to British place-names in the 19th century. Robert Adam's sisters spelled what's now known as 'Culzean' Castle in Scotland (which Adam rebuilt in the 1790s) as it's pronounced: 'Cullane'. The village where I live, Brightwalton, was until the early 20th century pronounced, and spelled, 'Brickleton'. These spelling shifts are another manifestation of 19th-century romanticism, though in darker moods I suspect they also served to separate educated sheep from local goats.
An excellent old-school alternate history essay. Bravo!
A Welsh-speaking friend told me that most bureaucratic Welsh now is obviously produced by Google Translate and that it's almost insulting to see how it's been done as a box-ticking exercise. So I guess that would be the next stage.