WELSH vs ENGLISH vowels - Which one has more?

A common comment made about the Welsh language, which is usually interpreted as derogatory, is that it has no or very few vowels.
I analyse what this statement actually means and look at the issue from different approaches. Since it is usually native speakers of English who make this accusation, I compare Welsh to English to give context to the info about Welsh I provide.
I make use of published data on letter and phoneme occurrence, scholarship, and phonological textbooks in order to put together numerical data about vowels in English and in Welsh, which I then compare.
The video approaches the issues from 4 angles: vowel letter inventory, vowel letter frequency, vowel (sound) inventory, and vowel frequency. The fact is that Welsh has more vowels than English in all these four ways of analysing it.
DIGRAPH DISCLAIMER: I know that combinations such as "ch" and "ll" are considered one letter each in Welsh, and are listed in the alphabet, but I counted them as two letters. Why? They're usually called digraphs, which means they are a pair of letters representing a single sound. But Welsh considers them to be a single letter anyway, so in what way are they a digraph? They are digraphs because they are composed of two separate "glyphs". The large number of digraphs in Welsh creates the impression of an abundance of consonants, but I didn't count digraphs as one otherwise I'd have to count English digraphs such "th" or "ss" as one letter as well, which I think would detract too much from the lay understanding of what a letter in printed text is.
All these issues are irrelevant when I count vowel phonemes, which is the most important number. The abundance of digraphs in writing should mean that there are far fewer consonant phonemes than consonant letters, but the overall consonant/vowel proportion remains the same in Welsh both in writing and in speech because there is an equivalent reduction in the vowel count due to the fact that diphthongs are a single vowel but are also represented by two glyphs.
If "ch", "ll", etc were counted as single letters, Welsh texts would have a whopping 47% of vowels as a proportion of all letters. I'm sure this number is much higher than would be obtainable for English, but I didn't do this calculation for English as it would involve deciding what to count as digraphs, such as "ss", "nn", "th" etc.

[@adrianjones8060]

Diolch am y wybodaeth. I’m a Gog and of course we’ve always been aware of our heightened linguistic capabilities,but it’s great to have it confirmed so eloquently non the less !!

[@nicokelly6453]

Diolch am eich fideo! Mae’n wych. :) I already knew this but it’ll be nice to have it in hard data so I can share it with people who comment “no vowels” when I write in welsh online 😔 thank you for sharing, this is great data! Love your welsh linguistics videos :) I’m betting most of those extra vowel sounds in North Welsh is from the Northern “u.” The most difficult sound for me to learn in North Welsh but a very pretty one!

[@hiriaith]

Yes, North Welsh has an extra vowel phoneme, which is usually represented by or in spelling, and it also shows up in diphthongs, so that's how North Welsh has more phonemes.

[@frankhooper7871]

When I was taught my vowels (way back in the '50s in California) we were taught that the English vowers were: a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y and w. Granted, w was only considered a vowel in diphthongs like cow, row [either pronunciation!] etc.

[@jahanas22]

I would consider w in English similarly as y. A semivowel.

[@rtperrett]

8:41 I can’t think any short vowels that end words in English other than schwa albeit English does not have long and short vowels, it is lax or tense.

[@hiriaith]

They're both actually. Tense vowels are long and lax vowels are short. But the difference between DRESS and SQUARE in Standard Southern British is a short/long difference only. And words like "happy" end in short vowels.

[@hiriaith]

If you look at the chart, Lindsay calls "long" all diphthongs and vowels used in place of historic /r/. What is commonly called long or tense vowels, namely FLEECE and GOOSE are actually diphthongs in Standard Southern British.

[@galinor7]

"Car" and "cat", "green" and "get". Long and short.

[@profejanealves3364]

♡♡♡♡

[@smason6947]

Mae hwn yn wych! Diolch!

[@Penddraig7]

I would disagree that there are 7 vowels letters in Welsh, technically there are 12 vowel letters in Welsh. 4 radical vowels and 8 secondary vowels in the same way that there are technically 31 consonant letters, 12 radical and 19 secondary this is if you don’t include J which was adopted for native English words adopted into Welsh. So for example C is a letter in English but in Welsh it represents 2 letters, C and the mutation of G, although they look like the exact same letter, they are technically different and this is down to the fact that when the Welsh “alphabet” was romanised the same Roman letter was used to represent multiple Welsh letters but over the centuries these in some case were altered to show they were different but it wasn’t the case for all. For example the Roman letter C covered 4 Welsh letters and over time they were altered and now those 4 C’s are C, Ch, Ngh and the mutated C (G) T used to represent 4 Welsh letters too but like with C those letters are now T, Th, Nh and the mutated T (D) you also have the letter B which was used to represent 3 Welsh letters, B, F (mutated B) and M (mutated B) So the F (mutated B) is a different letter to F but in the modern alphabet the distinction is lost whereas in the Welsh “alphabet” it would have been a unique letter distinguishable from one and other. You would have know instantly whether if was an F or a mutated B, there would be no need to understand Welsh grammar and what does and doesn’t cause the consonant mutations. As for the vowels, an A and a long A were distinguishable by a circumflex over the vowel, so A/a and Â/â and these too were unique vowel letters but became the same letter. The 4 radical vowels were a, e, i, o The secondary vowels were offshoots of the 4 radical vowels, so the secondary vowels of A - â E - ê, u, û I O - ô, w, ŵ, y Obviously when you are talking about the sounds themselves, you have the w which is sometimes an consonant and sometimes a vowel and y is sometimes an uh sound and sometimes an ee sound but on a purely written sense, there are technically 12 vowels in Welsh not 7

[@itzhurtz1083]

Nice ear piercing bro

[@galinor7]

Spanish only has five vowels.

[@watchmakerful]

Why does Welsh use "w" as a vowel? Isn't "u" enough?

[@frankhooper7871]

The same reason English has 'c' when either a 'k' or an 's' would serve the same purpose.

[@tryasavitsa5754]

its representing a different sound, i see it as simmilar to the ö vs o in german.

[@Penddraig7]

Because the Welsh U is not a U in the English sense. The Welsh U is pronounced like the i in skip and the Welsh W is pronounced like the oo in book. Ŵ which is the long W is pronounced like the oo in pool. Despite popular believe, many “English” words originate from Welsh words. Pool is one of those words. Pool coming from the Welsh word Pŵll, hence why the oo in Pool is pronounced differently to the oo in book and that’s because book also originates from the Welsh word bwc. An example of this in modern English are the scousers. Scousers originally being Welsh and that’s why they pronounce words like book and look with a Welsh long W. You also have the word Loch in Scottish for a lake which comes from the Welsh word Llŵch The romans had less letters than the Welsh did so when the Welsh “alphabet” was romanised, many Roman letters represented multiple Welsh letters. The Welsh V is what is now the Welsh W and the \|/ looking welsh letter that looks like a 3 pronged V is the ŵ (long W) but the Romans but that got confused with the Roman V which was a U in the modern English alphabet. So the U in Welsh is different to the U in English and that’s why you should never use the English sounds and alphabet to try and pronounce Welsh words, you have to learn the native pronunciations when enunciating foreign words