Lingo Differnces

[Stringmaker]

Spoken Welsh is more common now than it was 30 years ago and it is hard to get a job (in West Wales at least) if you do not speak Welsh to some degree!

I used to spend a lot of time in North Wales around Bangor and Anglesey. A good friend of my wife was born in South Wales and then moved North about 40 years ago. He was of the opinion that in the public sector the language was being used as the means to promote and protect a lot of mediocre people.

 

[rik_uk3]

In Wales "Taxi" is spelled "Tacsi" and is pronounced "Tack-si"
Mind you "rugby club" is "Clwb Rugbi" and "Bowls Club" is "Clwb Bowlio" ... sad but true!

And different again in the Valleys, regional variations in the Welsh language sometimes stump even Welsh speakers (Not me, my Welsh is poor) as they travel through different parts of Wales. For many years until digital TV arrived most of Wales had no Channel 4, we had S4C
http://www.s4c.co.uk/clic/c_index.shtml Thankfully we now have both

 

[boatman]

To use place-names as evidence for Gaelic or Brythonic speech being spoken in an area is prone to circular reasoning.

The area was Celtic therefore this place-name must be Celtic and we will distort the words to fit an approximation of Celtic and make some sort of translation then we will incorporate the results in a Celtic dictionary of place-names which will then be definitive for future "translations" and "proofs" that the main language in the area was Celtic.

 

[John Fenna]

And different again in the Valleys, regional variations in the Welsh language sometimes stump even Welsh speakers (Not me, my Welsh is poor) as they travel through different parts of Wales. For many years until digital TV arrived most of Wales had no Channel 4, we had S4C
http://www.s4c.co.uk/clic/c_index.shtml Thankfully we now have both

I gave up on learning Welsh - it is far too complicated!
Like many ancient languages it contains too many mutations and variances from its own grammatic rules, never mind huge regional differences ...mind you I was trying to learn the language while living in West Wales, working in North Wales and studying "BBC Welsh"! I was not making it easy for myself!

 

[Ivan...]

Please answer one question for me, what is the welsh for microwave? to either prolong my giggling or put me right .

Thanks

Ivan...

 

[Tadpole]

Please answer one question for me, what is the welsh for microwave? to either prolong my giggling or put me right .

Thanks

Ivan...

popty microdon

 

[resnikov]

popty microdon

I heard it was popty ping, but probably am wrong.

 

[Tadpole]

I heard it was popty ping, but probably am wrong.

Popty means oven and ping, so oven that goes ping(slang). popty microdon is microwave oven.

 

[Ivan...]

Thanks for that gentlemen, cos for years i was led to believe it was poppity ping, which made i laugh.

Ivan...

 

[Toddy]

My Uncle learned to speak and write in Welsh in the 50's. He was the engineer in charge of the change over to natural gas for Wales. He said that being a Scot somehow made it easier.
He liked the place and the people enough that he made it home.

I disagree with your circular argument theory Boatman, but then, in Scotland it is used as place name evidence for the changing languages.....and to some extent the incursions of Norse and Angle.
It is also used to differentiate between Pictish place names and later Scots Gaelic ones.

Pit is farmstead/holding while Baile is the same but in Gaelic. We can tie the name quite tightly to not only the actual use of the place but to the culture of people who owned and worked it.

Interesting to ramble around Scotland working out who was there before

cheers,
Toddy

 

[John Fenna]

Thanks for that gentlemen, cos for years i was led to believe it was poppity ping, which made i laugh.

Ivan...

Well - that would be understood around here OK!
I have not heard anyone call it a popty microdon....

 

[santaman2000]

Sorry if you took offence Windy, I was having some fun in the spirit of the thread, I actually love that languages mix and reform. (As you may see from some of my posts). It's like the way us Brits take the mickey out of the yanks for their "murdering" of the English language. If you actually look a lot of their grammar is actually "more" correct compared to ours if you go back a couple of hundred years. (The spelling is just bloody-mindedness in not wanting to seem to Anglo)......

Maybe. If you're decribing what's actually taght as proper grammer here. On the other hand if you're talking about how English is actually spoken in America you need to remember we have just as many regional differences as you so some of those might not be as close to proper English as you think (although I suppose some might be even closer)

As for the spelling difference you're partly right if what I've heard about Noah Webster is true. When he published the first American dictionary, he did indeed change the spelling in large part to differentiate it from Aglo spelling. But he was also trying to modernize the phonetics.

It's interesting to note though that the American influence on Spanish was/is even greater! In Puerto Rico they've changed the very conjugation structure to fit that of American and English even when speaking Spanish. A made up example would be:

-In Normal Spanish the English "The King's Highway" would be conjugated as "El Camino Royale" or literally translated as "The Highway of the King"
-In Puerto Rican Spanish it would be conjugated as it would be in America or England as "El Royale Camino."

 

[boatman]

and to some extent the incursions of Norse and Angle.

Interesting phrase Toddy. Angle incursions certainly but were there ever enough with time enough for the population to switch from some variety of Celtic or were the inhabitants already speaking proto-English? Another little problem is that both Scotland and Wales use some variation of Sassenach or Saxon for the "enemy" but the Scots didn't apparently meet or have problems with Saxons but with Angles so why would they not use some variety of that word?

 

[Filterhoose]

I think Sassenach's roots are actually from Irish Gaelic.

Windy

 

[Goatboy]

Wiki has a good condensed explanation:

In the Celtic languages, the word for the English nationality is derived from the word Saxon. The most prominent example, often used in English, is the Gàidhlig loanword Sassenach (Saxon), often used disparagingly in Scottish English/Scots. It derives from the Scottish Gaelic Sasunnach meaning, originally, "Saxon", from the Latin "Saxones". As employed by Scots or Scottish English-speakers today it is usually used in jest, as a (friendly) term of abuse. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives 1771 as the date of the earliest written use of the word in English.
Sasanach, the Irish-language word for an Englishman, has the same derivation, as do the words used in Welsh to describe the English people (Saeson, sing. Sais) and the language and things English in general: Saesneg and Seisnig. These words are normally, however, used only in the Irish and Welsh languages themselves.
Cornish also terms English Sawsnek from the same derivation. Sixteenth century Cornish were recorded to use the phrase 'Meea navidna cowza sawzneck!' to feign ignorance of the English language.[SUP][4][/SUP]
England, in Gàidhlig, is Sasainn (Saxony). Other examples are the Welsh Saesneg (the English language), Irish Sasana (England), Breton saoz(on) (English, saozneg "the English language", Bro-saoz "England"), and Cornish Sowson (English people) and Sowsnek (English language), Pow Sows for 'Land [Pays] of Saxons'.

 

[boatman]

All of the above but, again, why should Scots use a variety of the word Saxon when they met Angles or if later the word for the people they met was English, did anybody call the English Saxons from some time before the Norman Conquest? Simply repeating that the various Celtic words mean Saxon doesn't get us anywhere. Take Ireland, it was invaded by Normans supported by Flemings and Welsh then settled by English with the word Saxon not being used. In fact calling them Saxon would be meaningless to the average English person of the Middle Ages.

 

[Goatboy]

Depends on the impact the Angles had on others, they may not have mattered enough compared to later Saxon interactions?

 

[John Fenna]

Forigners do not always understand the differences in nationalities - I have heard some folk describe Wales as part of England and some folk call the Basque people French or Spanish... calling an Angle "Saxon" is not too different!

 

[treadlightly]

Welsh and Gaelic have probably been spoken more or less where they are spoken now for the last 2,000 years and not much further into their respective hinterlands. When was there any record of Lowlanders speaking anything but Lallans? I tend to subscribe to the heretical idea that proto-English was spoken pre-Roman period in Eastern England and lowland Scotland.

That may be true in scotland, i just don't know but is certainly not in Wales. The Welsh kingdoms once extended much further, well into Shropshire, for instance, in the north (the capital of Powys was once Wroxeter) and their language was Welsh. There was also Welsh, or a near relation, spoken in Cumbria in the early Dark Ages .

 

[treadlightly]

I used to spend a lot of time in North Wales around Bangor and Anglesey. A good friend of my wife was born in South Wales and then moved North about 40 years ago. He was of the opinion that in the public sector the language was being used as the means to promote and protect a lot of mediocre people.

The language is being used primarily to promote the language, which has survived against all the odds largely due to small communities which refused to give it up.