Fortis and Lenis | Irish and Ogham | Icelandic- runes from Old Norse | Old Welsh |

The terms fortis and lenis (in the wide sense) apply to this opposition regardless of whether it's only an opposition of voice or not. Therefore, it allows to speak in the same terms of French, English, or southern German consonants. In many languages the phonetic voice is only one of several features that constitutes this opposition. Fortis (Latin "strong") and lenis ("weak") are linguistics terms. In a wide sense, they refer to the opposition of consonants such as p, t vs. b, d.

Opposition of p, t versus b, d:

Most languages (including English) do not have distinctive geminates. Phonetic gemination occurs marginally. is often found where a root-word is preceded by another root or a prefix ending with the same letter or sound that the second root begins with. In phonetics, gemination is when a spoken consonant is "doubled", so that it is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a "single" consonant. The term comes from the word geminus, Latin for "twin". Estonian uses 'b', 'd', 'g' for short consonants, and 'p', 't', 'k' and 'pp', 'tt', 'kk' are used for geminates.

The words used in place names are called 'elements' and are grouped into types. Habitative - referring to a settlement e.g a farm or a hamlet examples are by, thorpe - Danish, ton, ham - anglo saxon - they form the end of names. Topographical - describe a landscape feature e.g steep hill, river bend. Personal Name - Can be Saxon or Danish. In the past unknown words have tended to be treated as personal names.

Irish, like all modern Celtic languages, is characterized by its initial consonant mutations whether syllabic or geminates. These mutations affect the initial consonant of a word under specific morphological and syntactic conditions. The mutations are an important tool in understanding the relatonship between two words and can differentiate various meanings. Irish uses two mutations on consonants also two mutations, t-prothesis and h-prothesis, found on vowel-initial words. Originally these mutations were phonologically governed external sandhi effects:

Norwegian settlers colonized Iceland at the end of the 9th century. The origins of Icelandic come from Old Norse, which was used by the settlers. The language has changed very little since the 9th century. The changes that have occurred are relatively minor compared to the other Scandinavian languages. It has not been influenced by other languages. An Icelandic substantive has four cases (common, genitive, accusative, and dative) while Swedish has only two cases (common and genitive). Icelandic sentences also have a relatively free word order. Another unique aspect of modern Icelandic is the fact that there are hardly any dialects within the language. The people in northern Iceland have a "hard" pronunciation of "p", "t", and "k", which is quite similar to the English letters. In the southern parts, these sounds have a "soft" pronunciation, therefore the "p" sounds almost like "b", and the "t" sounds like "d", and "k" sounds like "g".

Icelandic is related to Danish, Faroese, Norwegian, and Swedish. Together these make up the North Germanic branch of the Germanic language group, which is included within the Indo-European language family. Surnames, which exist from generation to generation in other European cultures, are rare in Iceland. In Iceland, the father's first name is used as the base to the child's last name.

The Icelandic alphabet (runes) of course has its origins in the common Roman-type alphabet. The most likely candidates for the origins of runic scripts are the 5th to 1st century B.C. Northern Italic alphabets: Lepontic, Rhaetic and Venetic, all closely related to each other and themselves descended from the Old Italic alphabet. Differing from the Ogham alphabet and Roman numerals, the Futhark Runes have not influenced Celtic writing or Roman numerals throughout most of the western world, but the Futhark Runes have also had their considerable influence on its appearance. A few accents over vowels introduced as many new letters. A greater difference shows up in Icelandic names using the traditional Runic based characters. The Runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes, formerly used to write Germanic languages, mainly in Scandinavia and the British Isles.

In all their varieties they may be considered an ancient writing system of Northern Europe. The Scandinavian version is known as Futhark (derived from its first six letters: 'F', 'U' 'Th', 'A', 'R', and 'K') having sixteen runes, and the Anglo-Saxon and Gothic/version as Futhorc (also so named after its first letters). Younger Futhark has sixteen runes and Elder Futhark-Ogham has twenty-four. If there ever were genuinely Gothic runes, they were soon replaced by the Gothic alphabet. The letters of the Gothic alphabet as given by the Alcuin manuscript (9th century), are related to the names of the Futhark. The names are clearly Gothic, but it is impossible to say whether they are as old as, or even older than, the letters themselves.

The old kingdoms of Rheged and Gododdin spoke Old Welsh. The distiction of the Old Brittonic dialects into separate languages begin in about the fifth century until the eleventh century where Cumbric from Welsh established words from dialect as though some of its features that are in the Celtic language, insular other than regional Gallo and Latin varied from Breton in Lower Brittany.

Welsh alphabet {a, b, c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ff, g, ng, h, i, l, ll, m, n, o, p, ph, r, rh, s, t, th, u, w, y.}The letter j is sometimes translated si.