Talk:pen-blwydd

There is a difference in pronunciation between

• pen-blwydd, i.e. /pɛn'blʊi̯ð/

and

• penblwydd, i.e. /'pɛnblʊi̯ð/

Hence the presence/absence of a hyphen. -- Picapica (talk) 08:27, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

• @Picapica: Do both spellings and both pronunciations actually occur? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 09:24, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Just look at Welsh-language greetings cards! There is, incidentally, or so it appears to me, a tendency for the same speaker to say, on the one hand, PENblwydd HApus! (happy birthday!) -- as a fixed phrase (and just possibly an unconscious echo of the "tune" of the English) -- and, on the other, such collocations as CAcen pen-BLWYDD (birthday cake). At any event, if there are two spellings there should, I believe, also be two pronunciations given in the article. -- Picapica (talk) 11:27, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't have access to Welsh-language greeting cards. And I can't help but be a bit skeptical that there's really a one-to-one correspondence between the two spellings. People (even Welsh people) just aren't that logical. I have difficulty believing that a single person would write on a birthday card, "Penblwydd hapus! [I'm going to bake you a] cacen pen-blwydd", using both spellings within the space of a dozen words. It's more likely that both spellings get pronounced both ways. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 12:50, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm sorry that you're out of range of Welsh greetings card shops, Angr -- and please accept my apologies for having presumed, without checking, that you were this side of Cefnfor yr Iwerydd. Here are, by way of illustration of my point, a couple of, randomly found, illustrations of Welsh birthday cards:

• https://cdn.noths-static.com/system/product_images/images/002/116/877/original_birthday-cake-pen-blwydd-hapus.jpg
• http://www.fathendesign.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/penblwydd_hapus_5_wm.jpg

I can fully understand your scepticism regarding the likelihood of any one casual user of the Welsh language going to the trouble of employing both spellings within the span of just two short sentences. Nevertheless, I'm fully persuaded that the very same speaker might very easily say (indeed, probably would say) "Penblwydd hapus! Bydda i'n crasu cacen pen-blwydd i ti" (even if that declaration implies that the speaker will certainly have to get her/his skates on!).

Bear in mind that Welsh spelling adheres much more closely than do perhaps most of the world's orthographies to the phonetics of the spoken language -- to the extent that in the dialogue of a typical Welsh novel one might easily see on one page the same word written down with three different spellings to represent the different pronunciations (varying by dialect / register) of two different speakers plus the "standard Welsh" of the narrator.

Of course, it would be asking too much of the Wiktionary fully to reflect such diversity. Nevertheless, in a case such as this, where two spellings (pen-blwydd and penblwydd) are in wide use with near equal status/frequency in the formal written language, the difference in pronunciation (which is the very reason why they are spelled differently!) really ought to be made explicit. Otherwise, why give both spellings? -- Picapica (talk) 00:49, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

@Picapica: I am on the same side of the Cefnfor yr Iwerydd, but I'm not on the same side of the Môr y Gogledd! Anyway, your links show that both "pen-blwydd hapus" and "penblwydd hapus" are found; presumably it's pronounced the same in both cases, which proves my point. And we give both spellings because both spellings are found, and would do so even if there were no pronunciation difference. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:10, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Angr, a chara. I don't accept that your assumption is self-evidently correct. The whole point of spelling a word in two or more different ways in Welsh is to distinguish pronunciation differences (although of course there will always be a certain amount of slapdashness in practice). But I hate wiki-arguments and would rather an article remained wrong than go in for prolonged wrangling (there is so much else to do!). I've now made the changes that I believe reflect the truth (pen-blwydd as the standard spelling, with penblwydd as a frequently found variant, reflecting a variant pronunciation; I've also changed the plural spelling to penblwyddi because that can ONLY be spelled that way -- since it's the only way it can be pronounced), and I'll now leave the field open to you. (Somewhere or other, though, there ought to be -- if there isn't already -- a wiki-explanation of the important stress-indicating role of the hyphen in Welsh spelling.) -- Picapica (talk) 16:52, 19 October 2017 (UTC)