[Spellyans] Late Cornish adaptations

[Michael Everson]

On 1 Aug 2008, at 18:52, Owen Cook wrote:

> 2008/8/1 Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com> rug screfa:
>> You'd propose <Jôwan> and <Kernôwek>, then?
>
> Not I: you would need to.

Me? I don't quite follow that.

> Unless we keep <ew> in Late Cornish as an umbrella graph for ew~ow.  
> Otherwise we have two <ow>s with different phonetic (and  
> phonological) values occurring in the same context.

To mark these values regularly.... Let's look at it a moment. (I am in  
Brittany and do not have my books with me.)

We do have some <bÿs>~<bës> words like (I believe) <bÿw>~<bëw> but  
that alternation is catered for. I am not sure how many of these there  
are. The SWF in §3.0 tries to use <y> as an umbrella graph for this,  
writing <yw> for what it says is [IU]~[EU] (it also claims to  
distinguish this from <iw> [iU]~[IU] which is a complete fiction).  
Apart from the verb 'to be' KS writes <ÿw>~<ëw> regularly, and KS  
rejects <iw> entirely.

We could either mark the <bêwnans>~<bôwnans> [eU]~[oU] words with  
circumflex, or we could mark the <Jôwan> words with a circumflex. This  
makes me wonder if there are words in <ew> which don't have an  
alternation... in which case <bêwnans>~<bôwnans> is the better choice  
as we would be marking an alternation. We would then have  
<êwna>~<ôwna> 'emend' and <owna> 'fear'.