Talk:Crwth

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[edit] Electric crwth?

"One characteristic feature of the crwth is that one side of the bridge goes through a soundhole and rests on the back of the instrument (the bottom of the box that forms the resonant cavity)" This is that acoustic form of the Crwth, right? Do electric Crwths exist? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 144.139.87.246 (talk • contribs) , at 15:33, 6 November 2005.

I doubt it. Never heard of one anyway. Flapdragon 16:46, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
Nor have I, and I've been actively involved with the instrument since 1970. Of course, I'm not counting the times that I (and perhaps others) have fudged and attached a clip-on mike to make its rather soft voice heard alongside more powerful modern instruments in non-traditional ensembles.

- JMB

[edit] Pronunciation

The article claims that 'crwth' rhymes with 'tooth', which in English can be pronounced two ways: /tuːθ/ or /tʊθ/ (from the article). In Welsh, according to this chart, only the first pronunciation (/kruːθ/) is correct. Can anyone confirm whether the second pronunciation is widespread in English? If not I'll change the wording; perhaps to say that the rhyme is with 'youth'. Gareth 19:56, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Tooth is often pronounced /tʊθ/ in South Wales, hence the choice of that word. It's not true that only [u:] is 'correct' in Welsh; [ʊ] exists as well. Flapdragon 12:35, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
Yes, but my point was that crwth is never pronounced /krʊθ/ in Welsh, I was wondering whether it was a widespread English pronunciation. Gareth 11:00, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
And on what basis do you make that very sweeping statement? How many conversations have you had in Welsh using the word crwth with people from different parts of the country, in order to be so certain? Is it just in this one not-exactly-common word that you challenge the vowel [ʊ]? In the case of English, why do you feel unhappy with [ʊ] for crwth if you accept it for tooth? Flapdragon 11:29, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
I make the 'sweeping statement' based on
  1. common experience (I have never heard /krʊθ/ whereas I've heard /kruːθ/ quite often on the radio etc.)
  2. the rules of Welsh pronunciation. In that section it states that in a stressed monosyllabic word ending in 'th', the vowel is long. The long 'w' is pronounced /uː/, the short 'w' is pronounced /ʊ/. Thus /kruːθ/ is correct.
Finally I checked on OED and they only have /kruːθ/ as a pronunciation in English.
I have no wish to turn this minor point into a heated debate but I would say that's that! Gareth 17:05, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Would you? The word "never" should be used with caution, don't you think, given how hard it is to prove a negative? Let's not get into the subject of pronunciation in Welsh since that's a separate subject, and a very ill-documented one too, on which all sorts of non-phoneticians have pronounced themselves in print (it's sadly symptomatic that none of the references in that article are from books on phonetics, which is because such things hardly exist for Welsh). I don't think OED would consider itself an authority on pronunciation incidentally, nor to be fully comprehensive of all possible pronunciation variants, that's not its raison d'etre, and of course not showing a particular form does not prove that it doesn't exist. As it happens I was once told (in Welsh) by Cass Meurig, who is in a position to have heard the word spoken many times by many different people from all over the country and beyond, that the pronunciation was /kruːθ/ in the north and /krʊθ/ in the south, and I see no reason to think that people that call it /krʊθ/ in Welsh would change to /kruːθ/ when speaking English. I'm not sure why you're so keen to remove something that cannot possibly detract from the article even if it does not chime in directly with your personal experience. Is "that" still "that"? Flapdragon 13:11, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] External links

The most recent addition is indeed about the crwth, but many of the other external links are links to the pages of players of the instrument rather than to information about the instrument. And some are 404. It's all tending towards the messy. Someone might want to clean them up. (I will, if I have time, but in the meantime..) Telsa (talk) 15:11, 8 September 2007 (UTC)