The dragon's tongue
Sir: With diffidence I acknowledge the erudition of your correspondents (Letters, 21 June, 5, 12 and 19 July), but to deal with this subject as if the Welsh language were unique in this respect or there were real difficulties in the concept concerned amazes me.
Surely ancient Hebrew with its rules in the (and I must transliterate, since I do not know if you have the typeface) Begadkelas altered some initial consonant sounds de- pending on previous vowel sounds in a sentence.
Also of course nouns often have an alpha- betical prefix signifying a pronoun or even a string of them. 'And', 'in', `all', 'from' each have their separate representative con- sonant. The whole grammatical structure is not beyond the comprehension of an eight or nine year old.
Why change Welsh?
Gerald B. Rose Jacey House, 16 Oxford Street, Manchester
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