Someone designed new Welsh direction signs...

[AndyB]

The question is what is achieved in terms of intelligibility by adding new letters to the alphabet? Will it not distance modern Welsh even further from early Welsh?

How many of the digraphs are actually a problem? The only odd consonants out are ll, dd and f, and the distinction between Y and U is more related to their common heritage than anything substantive.

I'm not even sure about the distinction between English Rh and Welsh Rh as the BBC describes it.

[Chris Bertram]

I'm not even sure about the distinction between English Rh and Welsh Rh as the BBC describes it.

The difference is that Welsh considers it to be a letter in its own right. English does not. You could make a case in English for ch, sh, rh, th, wh and others to be considered "letters", but it's not the way English works.

[AndyB]

And Ð/ð from Icelandic makes the voiced "th" sound, so make the new character look more like that, while Þ/þ is the unvoiced version,no need to invent a new shape.

According to Wikipedia, they did indeed use Ð/ð as late as the 16th century.

[FosseWay]

One has to ask what is wrong with Welsh orthography to begin with. It is, along with Italian and Spanish, one of the most logical writing systems using the Latin alphabet that I know of, in the sense that pronunciation is predictable with a high degree of accuracy from the written form. This is not true of English or Danish, for example, where there are numerous irregularities and many instances where written letters are not pronounced at all. French is slightly less wayward but you still need to know apparently irrelevant information such as whether a word is a noun or a verb in order to pronounce a given letter combination correctly.

I suppose mother-tongue English speakers learning Welsh would be marginally helped by using V for the /v/ sound and F for the /f/ sound. That is really the only change that could be introduced without causing other issues. Sure W doesn't look like a vowel to English eyes, and it would be more naturally rendered as U for English speakers, but that would introduce problems with how to write the vowel currently written as U so it doesn't get confused with others.

Back to the OP - that sign is truly awful, regardless of language or orthography. It's virtually illegible, especially at speed or in bad weather, and it has the aesthetic appeal of a squashed slug.

[Chris Bertram]

One has to ask what is wrong with Welsh orthography to begin with. It is, along with Italian and Spanish, one of the most logical writing systems using the Latin alphabet that I know of, in the sense that pronunciation is predictable with a high degree of accuracy from the written form. This is not true of English or Danish, for example, where there are numerous irregularities and many instances where written letters are not pronounced at all. French is slightly less wayward but you still need to know apparently irrelevant information such as whether a word is a noun or a verb in order to pronounce a given letter combination correctly.

I suppose mother-tongue English speakers learning Welsh would be marginally helped by using V for the /v/ sound and F for the /f/ sound. That is really the only change that could be introduced without causing other issues. Sure W doesn't look like a vowel to English eyes, and it would be more naturally rendered as U for English speakers, but that would introduce problems with how to write the vowel currently written as U so it doesn't get confused with others.

Back to the OP - that sign is truly awful, regardless of language or orthography. It's virtually illegible, especially at speed or in bad weather, and it has the aesthetic appeal of a squashed slug.

Unfair to squashed slugs!

And if you want languages where written letters aren't consistently pronounced, the Gaelic tongues are prime offenders. And Faroese uses a lot of "glide" consonants, where the apparent sound never appears in its own right, though the vowels either side do - "ð" and "g" serve this purpose quite a lot.

[the cheesecake man]

How would "I'm not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated. " look in this design?

[RichardA626]

And Ð/ð from Icelandic makes the voiced "th" sound, so make the new character look more like that, while Þ/þ is the unvoiced version,no need to invent a new shape.

According to Wikipedia, they did indeed use Ð/ð as late as the 16th century.

Was this due to the growth of printing around that time?

[Bryn666]

It's a no from me.

[exiled]

And Ð/ð from Icelandic makes the voiced "th" sound, so make the new character look more like that, while Þ/þ is the unvoiced version,no need to invent a new shape.

According to Wikipedia, they did indeed use Ð/ð as late as the 16th century.

Was this due to the growth of printing around that time?

Yes. Thorn (Þ/þ) and a similar letter in Scots yogh I think, the letter that means Menzies is pronounced Mingis, had no equivalent in German where the press started. So for thorn a 'y' was used, for yogh a 'z' hence 'Ye Olde Roadsign' is pronounced 'the old roadsign'.

[RichardA626]

According to Wikipedia, they did indeed use Ð/ð as late as the 16th century.

Was this due to the growth of printing around that time?

Yes. Thorn (Þ/þ) and a similar letter in Scots yogh I think, the letter that means Menzies is pronounced Mingis, had no equivalent in German where the press started. So for thorn a 'y' was used, for yogh a 'z' hence 'Ye Olde Roadsign' is pronounced 'the old roadsign'.

Yes that's what I thought.

[AndyB]

Traditional Irish script used an insular G which looks a lot more like Yogh.

[Vierwielen]

I have just come back from a week in mid-Wales. My wife did a certain amount of driving around (we used her car) and I had to navigate, which meant doing a lot on my feet (or rather sitting in the passenger's seat). While I respect the desire of the Welsh to use their own language on their road signs, they could do a bit to help motorists. In particular, I suggest that they use an italic font for Welsh text and an upright font for English text (or vice-versa). This does however bring in a problem when a piece of text is the same in both languages - should italic text or non-italic text be used? An alternative would be to use a serif font rather than a sans-serif font.

[Bryn666]

If the system was just Welsh first across the whole of Wales then it would have been a million times easier to parse out the stuff you didn't want to read.

There are many signs in Wales that would be better as symbols - advisory speed signs for example would be better as the German advisory blue square with speed in them, rather than trying to fit "Cyflymdra uchaf / Max speed" into the current sign.

I have long since argued that Welsh should be in a different colour to match what is done in Scotland but the problem with that is it goes against the language parity clauses of Welsh language regulations. The same applies to italics or different typefaces, the two languages are expected to be treated identically.

[Osthagen]

The proposed sign is an aesthetic disaster, but I am of the opinion that English and Welsh text should be better distinguished on signage, much as we do with Gaelic text.

I don’t see personally how putting one language in italics and another in normal font goes against the parity of the two languages. Surely it is mere logic to show a distinction between the two?

[Owain]

The proposed sign is an aesthetic disaster, but I am of the opinion that English and Welsh text should be better distinguished on signage, much as we do with Gaelic text.

I'm not sure who the "we" refers to in this sentence? The only place I've seen Gaelic text on signage is in the Irish Republic.

In Northern Ireland there is no bilingual signage. In Scotland, bilingual signage is distinguished by colour rather than font, and in Wales it is not distinguished by anything.

I don’t see personally how putting one language in italics and another in normal font goes against the parity of the two languages. Surely it is mere logic to show a distinction between the two?

Neither do I. To me it has always seemed vaguely ridiculous that in a town like Chepstow, Monmouth or Newport, everything (not only the road signs!) should be in both languages, because it will confuse the Welsh inhabitants of those towns just as much as it will confuse any foreign visitors. But as I'm not Welsh and I don't live in Wales, I don't see that I have the right to tell the Welsh what to do with their signage.

Having no comprehension of Welsh myself, I'd be quite happy to see English placed beneath the Welsh, and in italics; it would make it easier to discern, especially when travelling past it at speed. Certainly the different fonts used in Ireland made the signage more comprehensible than that in either Wales or Scotland. But, as I said, it's their country so it's their choice!

[Chris Bertram]

I'm not sure who the "we" refers to in this sentence? The only place I've seen Gaelic text on signage is in the Irish Republic.

Tut tut. *Never* call it Gaelic, it's Irish, each and every time. It may be *a* gaelic language, but Gaelic is the Scottish tongue.

[Owain]

I'm not sure who the "we" refers to in this sentence? The only place I've seen Gaelic text on signage is in the Irish Republic.

Tut tut. *Never* call it Gaelic, it's Irish, each and every time. It may be *a* gaelic language, but Gaelic is the Scottish tongue.

I meant "Gaelic text" as opposed to "Roman text"; i.e. I'm referring to the font, not the language.

I should probably have said "Celtic text", but at least I didn't call it "italics"!

[Osthagen]

I'm not sure who the "we" refers to in this sentence? The only place I've seen Gaelic text on signage is in the Irish Republic.

In Northern Ireland there is no bilingual signage. In Scotland, bilingual signage is distinguished by colour rather than font, and in Wales it is not distinguished by anything.

“We” is Scotland and Great Britain, and I was alluding to the use of different colours (yellow on primary, green on secondary) to differentiate between different languages for place-names on numerous roads.

My discussion of “italics” was out of personal preference, because I see this as a better way of setting apart two languages.

[orudge]

Maybe it's because I've spent a fair bit of time in Wales, but I've never found it particularly confusing having both English and Welsh on the same signs in the same font and colour (even if the order has historically changed somewhat randomly). It's usually reasonably obvious what you're looking for - yes, you might need to scan a couple of extra lines, but I don't really find it too big a deal.

VMSes flashing between a Welsh message and an English message (as opposed to using two different signs) I have found rather inconvenient, particularly if you can't necessarily see it due to other traffic then it flashes to Welsh before you get a chance to read it!

[Glom]

If the guy's creating new characters, doesn't this go beyond road signs? The last place you're going to use a unique writing system is in road signage. Have the new characters part of regular Welsh first, then put it on the road signs.

Also, that mockup sign isn't very readable. The use of earth tone colours makes contrast low and the thin font of the Welsh will be hard to make out at speed.