I'm sure that Welsh, Cornish and Breton have similar-but-different mutation rules (so Cymru becomes Gymru etc etc) but I know even less about that branch of Celtic languages.
The oft-quoted thing about mutations is that they are beneficial to the spoken language; they help the flow, and may well be one of the reasons non (Celtic) speakers consider these languages, particularly it seems Welsh, as more poetic or tuneful.
As a Welsh-speaker, the one thing I would say is that when spoken, people rarely bother too much about whether you have got the mutation exactly correct (other than a few cases where it grates). It's written Welsh where they get all het-up about it.
Welsh, particularly spoken Welsh, is almost obsessive about removing letters, phonemes or even whole syllables. If you were to write Welsh as she is spoken the apostrophe on your keyboard would wear out very quickly. Na, 's dim ishe mwy, 'dw i 'di ca'l llon' bol'
As regards vowels, the thing that English monoglots fail to recognise is that while we call "AEIOU" vowels, even English actually uses other letters in a very vowel-like way. Take "Y" as an example. The simple English words "by" or "cyst" or "dry" or "fly" or many, many others contain no vowels, except that "y" is used as a vowel. Welsh, of course, acknowledges that fact and adds "W" and "Y" to the list of vowels.
Some English friends of mine were startled on moving to live in Wales by an apparent lack of vowels in placenames - take Ynysybwl ("Uh-nis-uh-bull"), just north of Pontypridd as an example, and note the number of nearby places with a limited number of English vowels in their names.
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
