Comments on: Pontcysyllte Aqueduct

By: Skye

Skye — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 13:28:47 +0000

Where should you park if you are going to visit the Aqueduct?

By: Harry

Harry — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:00:54 +0000

Mae’n ddrwg gen i ond…

What Jel says makes no more sense than suggesting “th” for “ll”. It comes from someone who obviously knows nothing about Welsh phonetics and apparently does not speak Welsh (as you can tell from his very first sentence). Ignore it.

By: Jel

Jel — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:46:08 +0000

Mae flin ‘da fi, ond…
Sorry to say so, but phonetic transliterations from Welsh don’t work, as you are bound to get the emphasis in the wrong place and the sounds you transcribed are just plain wrong.
For many centuries, Welsh was spelled phonetically using the English alphabet and sound set as a basis, but adapting it where necessary. That they keep the doubled consonants and mutation elision of consonant pairs is deliberate, because the sounds are recognisably different – they were pushed to change, but have good reasons in the language not to do so.
To take that transcription of the w in dwr as oo, for example: it’s actually more like oouw, depending on the region you’re from a bit. The ph is a mutated p resulting from the concatenation of tra – crossing – and pont – bridge, which results in a sound with a hint of a v in it, the ph doing its best to become an f which is pronounced as a hard v, but in either case a certain distance from the soft ff you propose.
You’d do better to point Alex in the direction of a decent Welsh pronouncer.

By: RobK

RobK — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:02:51 +0000

Alex – just in case you ever do have to say it out loud, that’s “Traffont Thoor* Pont-kuh-SUTH-teh”. Roughly. The double L is the tricky part – if you have to wipe your chin afterwards then you’re doing it right

* with a hard “th” as in “them”, and a long “oo” sound

By: Alex Turnbull

Alex Turnbull — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:39:50 +0000

At the start of the 20th century, small commercial canals like this were made obsolete by roads, and many of the UK’s canals fell into total decay during this period.

It was only thanks to the birth of the canal leisure industry in the latter part of the century that any like this survive at all. In the 70s canals were restored by volunteers, and today “there are more boats on the canals than at the height of the use of canals for commercial purposes”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_canal_system

By: Keith T.

Keith T. — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:33:31 +0000

Seems like it’s a tourist attraction these days where presumably it was originally intended for cargo or other deliveries.

By: Glenn

Glenn — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:05:01 +0000

Not true Peter, there are lots of water “crossroads”, for example:

http://googlesightseeing.com/2007/09/26/a-canal-across-germany/

By: peter

peter — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:23:48 +0000

probably the only ‘map’ with rivers having a ‘cross-roads’ pattern google wont make a symbol for that