Surprise, I'm Welsh

[Sundog]

My family never talked much about genaeology, and I confess I was never much interested. I knew that we were mostly Irish and English with a smidgen of Cherokee tossed in. At least that's what I thought, until the other day when somehow the subject came up when I was talking to my Mom.

I said something about being mostly Irish and she said, "Well, actually you would be half Welsh, from my side of the family." I was astonished and embarrassed that I hadn't know this, but her grandfather's family had emigrated to America in the 1800's, her father had married a Welsh woman and she was 100% Welsh herself!

So now I'm very interested in the Welsh language and people. I knew Welsh was a strange and nearly dead language but I never realized HOW strange. Mad Linguist, I would love to hear anything you have to say on the subject.

Anyone know anything about Wales? The culture, what the people are like?

[Cleopatra]

Tsk tsk tsk

I don't understand your enthousiasm.You behave as if you discovered that you are Greek... :p

Capel Dodger is from Wales and the fact that you come from the place CD comes from, elevates you to the scale of my appreciation.

Let us point this thread to him... :)

[Sundog]

Originally posted by Cleopatra

Capel Dodger is from Wales and the fact that you come from the place CD comes from, elevates you to the scale of my appreciation.


Harummph. I thought I was already there. :p

[jj]

Originally posted by Sundog

Anyone know anything about Wales? The culture, what the people are like?

Can you sing? Do you know all the verses to 'Men of Harlech'? :)

(for those who might wonder, it's a JOKE, man, a Joke. My mom used to go to every event of the, err, how DO you spell that singing group)

[Sundog]

Originally posted by jj


Can you sing? Do you know all the verses to 'Men of Harlech'? :)

(for those who might wonder, it's a JOKE, man, a Joke. My mom used to go to every event of the, err, how DO you spell that singing group)

RIGHT over my head! Save me, Google... :D

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by Sundog
So now I'm very interested in the Welsh language and people. I knew Welsh was a strange and nearly dead language but I never realized HOW strange. Mad Linguist, I would love to hear anything you have to say on the subject.

Anyone know anything about Wales? The culture, what the people are like?

Strange and nearly dead? Not particularly strange unless you're coming from an Anglocentric perspective (certainly no stranger than German or Russian) ... and spoken by over a million people as a first language and taught as a second language in most of the English-speaking parts of Wales, so very much alive and kicking! It's also spoken by a colony in Patagonia if I recall correctly.

The rules of Welsh pronunciation are very simple:

c always like "k", unless in "ch"
ch like in German
f is v
ff is f
ll is kinda like "hl" - put your tongue bethind your top teeth and blow
dd is like "th" in leather
th is like "th" in smith
w is pronounced as a vowel, like "oo"
y is either "u" or "i"
u is like "i"
s is "sh" when the next letter is "i"

There are pretty much no exceptions to this - the worst bit is working out how to pronounce "y" as it's not always obvious from context - of course for native speakers this is no problem.

All public signs in Wales are bilingual in English and Welsh. This makes for some odd signs as English placenames in Wales are usually misspellings of the Welsh names - e.g. "Aberdovey" for "Aberdyfi" - although some are completely different e.g. "Anglesey" for "Ynys Môn".

The longest Welsh placename is Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysilio gogogoch. However, it was made up for tourists - the place is actually referred to as Llanfairpwllgwyn I believe.

The Welsh people are genetically speaking from the same mixed background as the rest of the UK. Culturally speaking, they're the descendants of Brythonic Celts (the "Britons") who once occupied of what's now Wales, England and southern Scotland. They were pretty heavily Romanised during the Empire, but were later driven out / wiped out by Anglo-Saxon incursions in the Dark Ages. King Arthur is the greatest Welsh mythic hero, famed for turning back the tide of the Saxons for a while. This is the origin of the Welsh-English antipathy.

The Welsh for "Wales" is "Cymru", which means "Land of the Fellow-Countrymen", which is kind of ironic because the meaning of "Wales" (from an Anglo-Saxon root) is "Land of the Foreigners".

Wales was never really a unified country until the English took it over. Divisions of the land were ruled by Princes; when Edward I (? I think) conquered the country, he made his son Prince of all Wales, which is why "Prince of Wales" is still the title of the heir to the English throne. Wales was politically unified with England under the Tudors, and remained so until a couple of years ago, when the province was given its own toy parliament. This has to some degree wrong-footed the Welsh nationalist movement, although there are some places where you can get a very frosty welcome if you sport an English accent. However, these types are in the minority; all the Welsh people I know are very pleasant.

Coal mining is traditionally important in the Welsh economy, as is tourism and sheep farming. Most of the country is mountainous. The industrialised areas are mostly along the South Coast; the Welsh-speaking areas are mostly in the North and West - particularly on Anglesey. The capital is Cardiff, near the English border in the SE.

[Shane Costello]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist:
The Welsh people are genetically speaking from the same mixed background as the rest of the UK.

Actually genetic research suggests that the Welsh have a distinct ancestry from the rest of the UK's inhabitants. It appears that in most of Wales the people are of "Ancient Briton" stock, as opposed to the rest of the UK where ancesty is more mixed.

"Viking" Gene Map of the UK and Ireland. (www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/bloodofthevikings/vikingmap.shtml)

[Clancie]

Congratulations, Sundog. Sounds like you'll have an interesting time learning about your heritage.

Slightly OT, but on the news the other night someone suggested that Prince William (future "Prince of Wales") should probably be learning Welsh rather than Swahili. Actually, I thought that was a very good idea.

I'll be curious what you learn about Wales. Now that you've mentioned it, I have to admit that about all I know is the stereotype that the Welsh are a poetic people who use their language well. Oh, and I've heard Welsh spoken and it sounds...pretty. :D

I know many famous actors come from Wales--Richard Burton, Emelyn Williams are two--but the only famous Welsh poet I'm familiar with is Dylan Thomas. I hope you'll share what you learn! :)

[Mr Manifesto]

I know the lead singer out of Catatonia is Welsh. My cousin-in-law is Welsh, and insisted on a Welsh-language wedding (it was his wedding, I didn't care). One of the British terms 'to vomit' is to 'speak Welsh'.

"Genghis Pwn! Bladdy hell, did you see his post ova at Jay-REF? He pervs on liddle girls, he does! Makes me want to speak Welsh! Hangin's the only language they understand. I'd pull the lever meself. Anyway, you won't believe who I had in my cab the ovva day... Only wassis name out of Oasis! Nice bloke, actually."

[LucyR]

Originally posted by Sundog

Anyone know anything about Wales? The culture, what the people are like?

They're the Irish who couldn't swim, aren't they? Other than that I don't know, except that I once heard that it's legal to shoot a Welshman crossing the border on a Wednesday. Probably apocryphal.

[Kilted_Canuck]

I'm quarter welsh, but my knowledge of the language and culture is basically the pronounciation of Cymru.

[JAR]

Originally posted by Cleopatra
Tsk tsk tsk

I don't understand your enthousiasm.[snip]

Ha, ha, ha

Predictable European response.

Europeans become so accustomed to hating Americans that when they hear that most of us are descended from Europeans, it bothers the hell out of them because it suggests that they, the Europeans, are nothing special and are actually related to these degenerate cultureless Americans.

And what Europeans would hate to know is that although most Americans speak English, the language of the first Americans, only a small percentage of us are descended from these first Americans, and they hate that because it means that our culturelessness is not genetic and that they could become just as cultureless over time.

[Mr Manifesto]

Originally posted by JAR

Ha, ha, ha

Predictable European response.

Europeans become so accustomed to hating Americans that when they hear that most of us are descended from Europeans, it bothers the hell out of them because it suggests that they, the Europeans, are nothing special and are actually related to these degenerate cultureless Americans.

And what Europeans would hate to know is that although most Americans speak English, the language of the first Americans, only a small percentage of us are descended from these first Americans, and they hate that because it means that our culturelessness is not genetic and that they could become just as cultureless over time.

Oh, JAR... You're projecting... :rolleyes:

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by JAR

Ha, ha, ha

Predictable European response.

Europeans become so accustomed to hating Americans that when they hear that most of us are descended from Europeans, it bothers the hell out of them because it suggests that they, the Europeans, are nothing special and are actually related to these degenerate cultureless Americans.

And what Europeans would hate to know is that although most Americans speak English, the language of the first Americans, only a small percentage of us are descended from these first Americans, and they hate that because it means that our culturelessness is not genetic and that they could become just as cultureless over time.

I see that you are experimenting with writing comedy now. This was a good one but I am sure that you can do better. :)

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by Mr Manifesto
I know the lead singer out of Catatonia is Welsh. My cousin-in-law is Welsh, and insisted on a Welsh-language wedding (it was his wedding, I didn't care). One of the British terms 'to vomit' is to 'speak Welsh'.

Yes, Cerys ("Keris") Matthews - the whole band is Welsh though (as are the Manic Street Preachers... and Tom Jones of course). Catatonia actually do some songs in Welsh (or partly in Welsh) though.

Not heard "speak Welsh" for "vomit". Must be a Southern thing (I'm Northern).

Clancie... to your list of famous Welsh actors you might want to add Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta Jones (both of them at least partly fluent in Welsh as well, from what I hear).

Prince William being the future "Prince of Wales" doesn't really mean a lot. It's a hereditary title which does not actually imply any real connection to the principality. To be quite frank, if he wants to learn Swahili, I say go for it.

Shane, I take the point about the Welsh having less in the way of Saxon and Viking ancestors than the English, but "Ancient Briton" is the mixed background I was referring to...

LucyR - in some border cities (Chester is one I think) there are (or were till recently) ordinances allowing you to kill a Welshman, but only with a bow and arrow, IIRC.

[Jon_in_london]

Wales is one of the most beutiful places I have ever seen, and I have seen a ******** of different places.

Welsh is certainly strange (I personally hold that the whole language is a joke to confuse the English) but by no means dying or close to death. You hear welsh being spoken (pretending to be spoken), widely in Wales and all road signs etc.. are in Welsh too.

I have some Welsh blood- my paternal grandmother's surname was Griffith.

[Jon_in_london]

Men of Harlech (Zulu Version).

Men of Harlech stop your dreaming
Can't you see their spear points gleaming
See their warrior's pennants streaming
To this battle field

Men of Harlech stand ye steady
It cannot be ever said ye
For the battle were not ready
Stand and never yield

From the hills rebounding
Let this war cry sounding
Summon all at Cambria's call
The mighty force surrounding

Men of Harlech onto glory
This shall ever be your story
Keep these fighting words before ye
Cambria will not yield


(I think Cambria is how you pronounce cymru, go figure).

[The Mad Linguist]

(I think Cambria is how you pronounce cymru, go figure).

It's not, but the two words are from the same root; "Cambria" is a Latinised form. The county name of "Cumberland" / "Cumbria" is from the same root. "Cymru" is pronounced "Kumri".

edited to fix tag

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by Jon_in_london
Welsh is certainly strange (I personally hold that the whole language is a joke to confuse the English) but by no means dying or close to death.

It's NOT strange, Jon. It only seems strange if you don't speak any language but English.... but in that case any foreign language would seem strange.

Welsh is actually pretty similar to English/French/German/etc., as are all European languages, looking at it cross-linguistically.

[Jon_in_london]

/pops in 'Zulu' video and cracks open a(nother) beer :D

BTW, the regiment that fought at Rorkes Drift still survives (South Wales Borderers I think) and have a museum in the town of Brecon.

[Jon_in_london]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist


It's NOT strange, Jon. It only seems strange if you don't speak any language but English.... but in that case any foreign language would seem strange.


I have a smattering of German, French, Zulu and ChiChewa.

I am pretty good with Afrikaans so can make do with Flemish and Dutch.

I still think Welsh is strange and I still maintain that Welsh is a joke played on unsuspecting Englishmen.

Ya-boo.

[The Mad Linguist]

What exactly makes Welsh strange?

[Jon_in_london]

Relax, Im only half serious. ;)

[The Mad Linguist]

Sorry.... hair-trigger issue though... a key topic in my linguistic training was that aesthetic judgements about languages and dialects are almost always based on our preconcieved biases about their speakers.

So when you diss Welsh as a strange language.... the "English nationialist bigot" sign starts flashing in my head...

You're right though... I need to relax... take a chill pill...

[CapelDodger]

The wierdest thing about Welsh is the "mutation" of sounds, wherby certain sound become other sounds if they follow yet other sounds. For instance, Cardiff is Caerdydd (the "dd" is a sort of soft "th" with a slight buzz), but "in Cardiff" is yn Nghaerdydd. The N and C combination are regarded as hard and un-lyrical. That's the soft mutation (or part of it); there's also a hard mutation. This is partly why Welsh sounds so song-like, and it is a lvery lyrical language. It shares much of the Breton vocabulary, but the grammar is rather different. I banged my head against it at school for a couple of years then gratefully took on French instead. The language is very old (which is why it's taken on so many complications), and very different from the Romance and Germanic languages of Western Europe. It is said their there are six regular Welsh verbs, all different, and the the rest are irregular. But to learn enough to get by in pubs isn't that much harder than any other European language.

At least the spelling is phonetic.

The Welsh were the inheritors of the Graeco-Roman culture, including Christianity, when the legions were withdrawn - at that time, of course, they were the British, and there are naturally some who want it back. The culture celebrates the poet and the singer more highly than the warrior, something they share with the Irish and other Celtic cultures so it must be a very ancient trend.

The national sport and passion is Rugby Union, otherwise known as proper rugby, and the national aim is to beat England. Over and over again for ever, never pausing for breath. Sadly the current team is in a bit of a mess, and the World Cup's coming up. Associated with rugby is beer-drinking - not usually while playing (it's been known) but before, after and while watching.

The Stereophonics are also Welsh. Wales was a centre of the Industrial Revolution, and as a result (industrial) South Wales is very different from (rural/tourist) Central and North Wales. South Wales received more Irish immigrants during the Famine than America, and a third of the population claims Irish ancestry. There was a Welsh whisky created in, I think, the '20s which was awful and got worse with age. (There are now a couple of quite good Welsh whiskies.) There are beautiful beaches and excellent surfing in the south-west (which faces the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic; boy, do they come rolling in down there on occasion). Also mountains, and castles, castles, castles.

There was a twelfth-century prince of South Wales known as Llewllyn the Last - while he lived. Only in Wales.

Hope that helped. It's a great place; come see. Spend some money. Bring your friends.

[Jon_in_london]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
[BIt's a great place; come see. Spend some money. Bring your friends. [/B]

I'll second that!

And hope to be climbing Fan-y-Big soon!

[Jon_in_london]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
So when you diss Welsh as a strange language.... the "English nationialist bigot" sign starts flashing in my head...


I may well be an English nationalist, but Im no bigot.... but thats another thread..:)

[BillyTK]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
LucyR - in some border cities (Chester is one I think) there are (or were till recently) ordinances allowing you to kill a Welshman, but only with a bow and arrow, IIRC.
Shrewsbury is such a place--an obscure byelaw which has yet to be repealed means you are permitted to shoot any welshman found inside the castle walls after midnight, but only with a bow and arrow.

Originally posted by Sundog
Anyone know anything about Wales? The culture, what the people are like?
My wife is welsh; the accent from her neck of the woods (Newport, South Wales) is so strong I have no idea what anybody is saying, which leads to the odd embarrassing situation... On the whole, the people of the area are pretty friendly, although there tends to be a degree of hostility to the english the further north you go.

I was in Blackwood (the Manic's home village) last weekend, but I didn't see any of them :). The singer from Feeder is also from that area; Newport is like the Welsh Seattle ;)

[Cleopatra]

What about the food? Is there a Welsh Cuisine?

[RSLancastr]

Originally posted by Jon_in_london
Men of Harlech (Zulu Version).Now THAT brings back some memories. In 7th grade, the school orchestra I was in played the Welsh March. The poor second violins (of which I was one) spent nearly the entire piece playing eighth notes on the open D string.

Endlessly.

Thanks for making me relive this nightmare:

DDDD DDDD DDDD DDDD DDDD DDDD DDDD DDDD DDDD

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
[B]The wierdest thing about Welsh is the "mutation" of sounds, wherby certain sound become other sounds if they follow yet other sounds.

Consonant mutation is not particularly weird. Consider the sounds of "p" in "pit" and "spit". They're different. The cause is the preceding "s". How about "l" in "milk" as opposed to "long"? (I'm assuming a mainstream English accent here). It is more far-reaching and systematic in Welsh, and more closely linked to the grammar, than in English, but there's nothing particularly weird about it.

The language is very old (which is why it's taken on so many complications), and very different from the Romance and Germanic languages of Western Europe.

The notion that one language can be "older" than another is a difficult one. Where does a language start? Yes, there has been language referrred to as "Welsh" for over 1,500 years; but a modern Welsh speaker would have difficulty understanding a speaker of Old Welsh. Where does English start? With Shakespeare? With Chaucer? With the Beowulf poet? With the Germanic tribes? Since English and Welsh descend from a common ancestor that lived a known (approximately) length of time ago, how does it make sense to say that one is older than the other? Languages are as likely to lose complications over time as gain them (and in fact, frequently do both, resulting in the complexities shifting from one area of the language to another).

All languages are equally complex, pretty much; simplicity in one area tends to be compensated for by complexity in another. So, Welsh may have consonant mutation, but it doesn't have the umlaut and ablaut of English (man/men ; sing/sang/sung), or the system of inserting semi-consonants between vowels, or the bizarre gender system of English, or....

It is said their there are six regular Welsh verbs, all different, and the the rest are irregular. But to learn enough to get by in pubs isn't that much harder than any other European language.

If the regular verbs are all different, then by definition they're irregular! I think I'm gonna call urban myth on that one. I think the following gives a clearer picture:

BBC Wales on Welsh grammar (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/learnwelsh/pdf/welshgrammar_allrules.pdf)

There's a paradigm, which doubtless has exceptions as all paradigms do, and of course there are irregular verbs - the verb for "be" is pretty irregular and very common - just like in English.

The only thing that makes learning Welsh harder than learning a Romance or Germanic language is that English is a Germanic language with a massive Romance influence - so there are familiar words to be found in those languages which isn't to be found in Welsh (or at least, not as often; Welsh does have some Romance vocabulary, absorbed from Latin).

Edited to add: A quick bit of research has shown that Welsh does have ablaut or something similar, so I was wrong about that - sorry!

[mummymonkey]

Cleopatra
What about the food? Is there a Welsh Cuisine?
Leeks, seaweed and coal.

[The Mad Linguist]

bara brith.... mmm.....

[davefoc]

Mad Linquist, you have said several things that have intereseted me, and I would enjoy your more detailed thoughts about them.

1. " aesthetic judgements about languages and dialects are almost always based on our preconcieved biases about their speakers."

I find French to be an inherently pleasant lanquage to listen to. You believe that this is because of some learned associations and not because French has characteristics which are just pleasant to listen to?

2. You said that all lanquages are about equally complex. Based on what I understand of Vietnamese and what I know of French I would think that French is a substantially more complex lanquage. As I understand it in Vietnamese tenses are always created with an auxilliary word and a base word and the base word does not change either with subject or with tense. This seems like a huge simplification to me and as such I would see French as more complicated than Vietnamese if this was the only issue. French also has gender associated with inanimate objects and pronouns that go in a different place in a sentence than the nouns they replace.

3. I was under the impression that all the various Gaelic lanquages are fairly closely related, meaning that Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and I thought Welsh were quite similar. This isn't true? I am also aware that there are several dialects of Irish Gaelic most of which are in the process of dying out. Is something similar to this true of Welsh also?

[mummymonkey]

Welsh is a p-Celtic language, along with Cornish and Breton. The Gaelic languages of Ireland, Man and Scotland are q-Celtic languages. Welsh speakers, by and large, can not even understand other p-Celtic languages let alone q-Celtic languages. They are about as far apart as English and Dutch. (Perhaps further).
As far as I know there is only one flavour of modern Welsh. This is probably because it is no longer a first language, being artificially kept alive as a second, school learned, language with government subsidies from English tax payers. ;)

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by davefoc
1. " aesthetic judgements about languages and dialects are almost always based on our preconcieved biases about their speakers."

I find French to be an inherently pleasant lanquage to listen to. You believe that this is because of some learned associations and not because French has characteristics which are just pleasant to listen to?

The research to which I refer (I'm sorry, I don't have any references to hand, but you could try googling) was done with the dialects of England, Scotland and Ireland.

When English speakers of English were asked to rate them for their attractiveness, the urban accents (Belfast, Scouse, Manc, Brummie, Geordie, Glasgae, Cockney etc.) were consistently seen as ugly and the rural accents (eg. Southern Irish, West Coast Scots, also some rural Welsh I think) plus RP were seen as attractive. When some Americans, who were less likely to have existing preconceptions, were given the same survey, their judgements were completely different (and they did not, so far as I recall, agree with each other, except they rated RP highly).

The explanation offered is that our aesthetic judgements of language are based on our preconceptions of the speakers. Accents associated with grim inner cities get low marks, accents associated with pleasant rural areas or with the educated ruling class (RP) get high marks.

I have a vague memory that the same tests were done with languages - but it's far from surprising that in the US and England, for instance, French is often classed as attractive and German as ugly, given the history of the past century.

My personal suspicion is that individual voice has a lot more to do with how pleasant someone's speech is than what language they are speaking.

2. You said that all lanquages are about equally complex. Based on what I understand of Vietnamese and what I know of French I would think that French is a substantially more complex lanquage. .... This seems like a huge simplification to me and as such I would see French as more complicated than Vietnamese if this was the only issue.

You're right, but this is unlikely to be the only issue. The complexity is likely to be shunted to some other part of the grammar. Note also that a large part of the complexity is shared by ALL languages, so we don't really notice it. Now the other issue is that we interpret complexity through the filter of our native language - so a language whose complexity is in the same place as our native language's complexity will perceived as simpler than one that is not. For example, English is inflectionally pretty simple, which is why English speakers struggle with the inflections of Latin as a point of added complexity. English word order is very important to meaning, so we may not see it as a matter of added complexity when a language makes an equally big deal out of word order.

3. I was under the impression that all the various Gaelic lanquages are fairly closely related, meaning that Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and I thought Welsh were quite similar. This isn't true? I am also aware that there are several dialects of Irish Gaelic most of which are in the process of dying out. Is something similar to this true of Welsh also?

Mummymonkey has got the main point, but with some slight inaccuracies. The p-Celtic and q-celtic languages are separated by over 2,000 years of language evolution. Welsh is indeed not Gaelic (Goidelic) - it's Brythonic. Cornish is dead (although there are efforts ongoing to revive it) and Breton is worse off than Welsh. There is, however, some anecdotal evidence that Breton and Welsh are mutually comprehensible on at least a basic level. Apparently, the old Breton onion sellers who used to cross the Channel could manage to communicate in Wales.

The Goidelic languages are Manx (dead), Irish Gaelic (almost dead, but sustained in Eire as an official language), and Scots Gaelic (on the critical list with only a few tens of thousands of first-language speakers). Irish and Scots Gaelic are mutually comprehensible, but differ on some points of grammar.

The third known branch of Celtic, Gaulish, died over 1,000 years ago; although there were other branches I don't think we have much direct evidence of them.

Welsh dialect differences do exist. The most significant is the north-south divide, the two sides of which differ in phonology and I believe some vocabulary too. But I believe there are also some differences between the written and the spoken languages (although my reading on that is fairly sketchy so don't quote me).

Mummymonkey's biggest error is the statement that "it is no longer a first language, being artificially kept alive as a second, school learned, language ". This is far from the case. Perhaps you're getting confused because there are now very few, if any, monolingual Welsh speakers; but there are plenty of first-language speakers who are brought up bilingual in Welsh and English. This doesn't mean Welsh is dying; after all, bilingualism is probably the natural state of the human being. Altogether I think there are about a million native speakers and of course, lots of others who learn it at school. Compared to many other endangered languages, which are heading for extinction with a few hundred or a few dozen speakers, Welsh isn't even on the sick list.

[JamesM]

Fascinating stuff, TML. Perhaps you can help me on a matter of Greek-god pronunciation on this thread? (http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25141)
Originally posted by The Mad Linguist

Cornish is dead (although there are efforts ongoing to revive it)
To confuse matters further, there does appear to be three competing versions of Cornish (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2206191.stm)

[Nikk]

Originally posted by CapelDodger

Hope that helped. It's a great place; come see. Spend some money. Bring your friends.

Plus bring a raincoat, warm clothing and several umbrellas. If you plan to go swimming a wetsuit is a good idea. I was snorkelling in the sea off Pembrokeshire ( the south western bit ) last August and even with a one piece wetsuit, a neoprene jacket on top and a neoprene hood the cold still made my head hurt.

Still the sun shines sometimes and it is worth a visit.

[CapelDodger]

From the Manic Linguist:
The notion that one language can be "older" than another is a difficult one. Where does a language start?
To attempt an analogy, all rocks are made of equally old material but rocks are regarded as having different ages. When rock is processed through the mantle it loses all its volatiles and structure and comes out pristine, then begins to accumulate new volatiles. In the same way languages such as French or Anglo-Saxon form as pidgins, necessarily simple. As they mature and become codified they accumulate quirks and complexities. English is so still so simple it doesn't even have a proper future tense.

As for the irregular verbs, it's a light-hearted statement, but there is a little truth in it. Mutations, though, are a thing of wonder, and not just like the changes that are almost spontaneous when one sound follows another. The change from "K" to "Ngh" (a nasal "ng" with a touch af aspirant) is pretty drastic, and the systems are totally formalised.

[CapelDodger]

From the Mad Linguist:
Mummymonkey's biggest error is the statement that "it is no longer a first language, being artificially kept alive as a second, school learned, language ". This is far from the case.
Absolutely. For some reason it's not taken as natural that Welsh-speakers with their Welsh-speaking friends and neighbours will speak Welsh. It's expected that the French will be speaking French in France, but you commonly hear English people claiming that the Welsh only speak their language when their are English about. How they claim knowledge of what language people are speaking when they aren't present eludes me. Funny bunch, the Saisneg.

[Cleopatra]

Capel Dodger, do you eat seaweeds and coal as mummymonkey said?

[CapelDodger]

From BillyTK:
Shrewsbury is such a place--an obscure byelaw which has yet to be repealed means you are permitted to shoot any welshman found inside the castle walls after midnight, but only with a bow and arrow.
I think it's actually after dark on the left bank of the Severn (on the English side of the Welsh Bridge, since the English bridge doesn't have a Welsh side). In Hereford any Welshman could be nailed to the cathedral door. A bit off-putting, but, Duw, look at all those big fat cattle down there ... There's an English nursery rhyme: "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief. Taffy came to my house and stole a leg of beef." Not just the one leg, madam, we're here for the herd. They've headquartered the SAS in Hereford, so that's all over now.

[JAR]

In my opinion, Welsh words look like something out of a fantasy novel. My younger brother thinks the same. Upon seeing some Welsh words, he said, "Well, Welsh does sound cool."

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
From the Manic Linguist:

To attempt an analogy, all rocks are made of equally old material but rocks are regarded as having different ages. When rock is processed through the mantle it loses all its volatiles and structure and comes out pristine, then begins to accumulate new volatiles. In the same way languages such as French or Anglo-Saxon form as pidgins, necessarily simple.
Pidgins are indeed simpler than other languages, because they have no native speakers. When a pidgin acquires native speakers, it becomes a creole, which is as complex as any other language.

Current thinking is that neither French nor Anglo-Saxon began as pidgins or creoles. French is basically a development of Vulgar Latin and Anglo-Saxon is a development of West Germanic. Both Latin and WG are as "old" as P-Celtic.

A better analogy than your "rock" analogy is the species analogy: we point to new species as evolution goes on, but really, each of the new species has just as much evolving time behind it as any of the old species. Biologists draw lines between species but this is to an extent arbitrary, the reality of change is a continuity.

If you wish to come up with a set of criteria for deciding when one language has ended and a new one been created, good luck with that. Let me know when you're done. Until then, I maintain that it's essentially meaningless to say that any language alive today is "older" than any other language alive today (with the exception of recently-created creoles).

As they mature and become codified they accumulate quirks and complexities. English is so still so simple it doesn't even have a proper future tense.


Actually, the opposite is the case. English has lost many of the kind of complexities that you're talking about as time went on (and acquired different complexities instead). And Germanic languages have never had a future tense. Around the world a typical tense system is a 2-way distinction - either past vs. non-past or future vs. non-future. The threeway split is actually rather rare. A number of languages, e.g. I think Chinese, have no tenses at all - they have a highly complicated aspect system instead.

You're right that the English tense system is simple compared to many languages. Guess what? We have another area which is more complex to make up for it (the highly complicated world of English auxiliary verbs).

You're comitting the error of thinking that the only kind of complexity is inflectional complexity (the kind of complexity that languages like Latin have in spades). It's not. English lacks inflectional complexity, but it's made up for in other ways.

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by JAR
In my opinion, Welsh words look like something out of a fantasy novel. My younger brother thinks the same. Upon seeing some Welsh words, he said, "Well, Welsh does sound cool."

Actually, it's the other way around - fantasy words look like Welsh. Tolkien imitated the general flavour of Welsh for one of his Elf languages (Sindarin, the one they usualyl speak in the Lord of the Rings films) and all other fantasy writers imitated Tolkien!

[CapelDodger]

From Cleopatra:
Capel Dodger, do you eat seaweeds and coal as mummymonkey said?
Hey, every toddler eats coal when they first discover it. The seaweed is called lava bread and is very nutritious and vile. The look of it is beyond the most complex language, but if it could be described the word "retch" would be involved.

You can take that as a no. I don't even, you know, do that stuff with sheep. A slander on the nation, that is, like the Greeks being overly fond of goats. It's down to national envy.

Bara brith, which is a sort of heavy cake or malt loaf and should be sliced and spread with butter, is a thing of marvel and will get you through a morning's physical labour. There are also Welsh cakes, which are a sort of griddle scone ... you'd have to be there, really. They used to get me mobbed when I returned from a visit to my parents, since, of course, Mam knows I can't be eating properly.

One thing about South Wales, and Cardiff in particular, is that it is very cosmopolitan and has been for two hundred years. In the 1850's and 60's Cardiff was the busiest port in the world (measured by bulk; by value, of course, it was London). So there's always been a lot of Somalis (famous seamen), Chinese, Indians, Caribbeans and whatever around. As a result there are a lot of good, long-established restaurants.

Also ice-cream, how could I forget that? There's a strong Italian presence in South Wales, with which comes excellent ice-cream. The story goes - and I'm pretty confident of it - that in about 1910 a captain dropped a shipload of Italian emigrants in Cardiff, telling them it was America. By the time they found out he was well gone. Some of them carried on, but others either couldn't or found that there were opportunities here. During World War II a lot of Italian prisoners of war were sent here, and worked on parole on local farms and such. They found an existing Italian community, and/or bowled over a local girl, and stayed on after the war - no problem given the post-war labour shortage. And so, ice-cream. Grazzi.

[CapelDodger]

From the Mad Linguist:
And Germanic languages have never had a future tense
Hey, what the tree-biters have problems with is not my concern. I don't even speak Welsh, so I'm in no position to argue.

I love English, by the way. Really love it.

[The Mad Linguist]

How do I manage to find myself, on the same thread, defending Welsh from the English and English from the Welsh?

I need a lie down.

[Luciana]

Trolling the thread a little bit -

The Mad Linguist, I'm really enjoying your input in this thread. In many other threads in the past I've argued against the common misconception that such and such languages are more complex than others. The only difference being is that you can explain better than I possibly could. I used to have many doubts regarding linguistics but now that you appeared I have, as luck would have it, forgotten them all. But when something comes up, I'll ask. :)

Meanwhile, I've been reading, delighted, your explanations, and wondering why the hell I had so many lousy professors in this subject, and why I didn't persevere when I had the opportunity. (Sigh.)

[Cleopatra]

I am hiding behind Luciana's skirt to add a similar comment :D

Mad Linguist, your comment about the age of the languages and their complexity filled my heart with joy because the issue of age and complexity of the Greek language is one of the most common arguments of the Greek-right-wing nationalists that support silly theories of our superiority--of course they do not dare to talk about a racial supperiority so they talk about a vague cultural superiority. Maybe you would like to start a thread about this, I mean about language as a tool of political propaganda, although I know that we are shamelessly talking advantage of you.

After all, you come here to relax and not to talk about your science all the time. We appreciate the time you take :)

Now, this is a great thread, I learned many many things. From linguistics to cuisine!! :) Although I rarely rate threads I will definetely do it this time.

Funny, I stayed in UK for so long but I never visited Wales, maybe because I didn't have any Welsh friends and of all the places I have visited in my life, in the four continents, it is Scotland that has stolen my heart for once and for good , another reason I didn't visit any other places in UK once I discovered Scotland. Next time I will be in UK, I will visit the area for sure :)

[Tony]

Im having trouble understanding the concept of a future tense. How does that work? What would a future tense in english sound like?

[mummymonkey]

Wesh & Gaelic of course, belong to the group of languages known as "NotEnglish". NotEnglish languages are spoken in areas of The British Isles that used to be owned by England but are now just places to go on holiday. That's assuming one's holiday home hasn't been raised to the ground. Speakers of NotEnglish can be recognised by the large chip on their shoulder.
As well as the NotEnglish language, we now have NotEnglish parliaments and assemblies, street signs, and NotEnglish TV.
Some English people like to learn a flavour of NotEnglish because they feel guilty. Those who don't speak NotEnglish and live in an area where NotEnglish is mainly spoken are made to feel bad. Lucky for them their children will be forced to learn NotEnglish at school.

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by Cleopatra
After all, you come here to relax and not to talk about your science all the time. We appreciate the time you take :)

Ah, not at all, it does me good to explain this stuff... it's a long way from what my research addresses...

That said I'm leaving professional linguistic research at the end of this month, so my username is going to become somewhat less than accurate (well, the mad part still applies, of course).

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by Tony
Im having trouble understanding the concept of a future tense. How does that work? What would a future tense in english sound like?

Well, to take French as an example, you have:

je regarde
je regardais
je regarderai
je regarderais

(someone correct me if that's wrong, it's been a while since I did French verbs!)

The tenses are Present, Imperfect, Future and Conditional respectively (now if you really want to get technical you can start on the differences between Tenses, Aspects and Moods, but that's another story). English doesn't have the last three of these tenses, so we achieve the same meanings using auxiliary verbs (extra verbs that don't mean very much but change the grammar of the main verb). So:

je regarde -- I watch
je regardais -- I was watching
je regarderai -- I will watch
je regarderais -- I would watch

If English had a future tense, it would basically package up the meaning of "will watch" into a single word. But it doesn't have one, and it's not likely to for many centuries at the very least.

[CapelDodger]

From the Mad Linguist:
If English had a future tense, it would basically package up the meaning of "will watch" into a single word. But it doesn't have one, and it's not likely to for many centuries at the very least.
I suspect that if English increasingly becomes a common second language, there will be a stabilising effect. Vocabulary will change, of course, but there is no real need to complicate syntax. Spelling will surely simplify (even more than US spelling has simplified UK spelling), and a good thing too.

From moneymonkey:
Some English people like to learn a flavour of NotEnglish because they feel guilty
In might actually be politeness. The French, for instance, are notorious for both speaking NotEnglish but expecting NotFrench speakers to take up their language if they move there. The polite thing is to humour them.

That's assuming one's holiday home hasn't been raised to the ground.
That should be "razed" - English spelling, hey, what you gonna do. This, to the uninitiated, refers to the policy of burning down weekend cottages because locals were being driven out of the housing market - a common situation, but the policy did work. It got a lot of publicity, and the Welsh weekend-cottage market took a serious dive.

I think I'll put this post through a spell-checker before I submit it ...

[mummymonkey]

Please forgive me CapelDodger. My native language is NotEnglish.

[JAR]

One big influence that the Brythons(the modern representatives of that people being the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons.) had on the literary world is Arthurian legend.

The earliest known appearances of Arthur and references to him occur in writings written in Brythonic and/or written by Brythons.

[The Mad Linguist]

Are you thinking of the Mabinogion JAR? Written in old Welsh and one of our oldest sources on Arthurian legend. The main part contains even older myths, but the latter part has details of Arthurian legend.

Arthur seems to be based on a British (==Welsh) war leader who fought back the English invasions (temporarily). However, the accretion of legend around him is such that all we know of the "real" person is that he probably existed and he was probably a King.

Lancelot... Guinevere (Gwenhwyfar, "White Ghost" in Welsh)... Camelot... Excalibur... Merlin... all either originally separate stories that got linked to Arthur, or plain fiction added as the tale grew.

Geoffrey of Monmouth (another early source for Arthur) wrote in Latin IIRC.

[mummymonkey]

The Mad Linguist
Guinevere (Gwenhwyfar, "White Ghost" in Welsh)
That's interesting. I learned from another thread today that my daughter's name (Jennifer) is a modern version of this. Wait till I tell her she's named after a Cornish ghost! (Actually it was on the name tag of a supermarket checkout girl but this version sounds better).

[JAR]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
Are you thinking of the Mabinogion JAR?

That's one of them. So far, concerning books written a long time ago with Arthurian stuff in them, I've read:

Gododdin by Aneirin
The Mabinogion
History of the Britons by Nennius
The Welsh Annals
Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory

All the versions I read were translations except Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which I read with the Middle English on one side and Modern English on the other in order to work on my Middle English.

The version I read of Le Morte d'Arthur had the spelling of words modernized, but other than that, it wasn't translated.

I got into this Arthurian stuff after I saw the movie "Excalibur." I was sort of interested in Arthurian legend before that though. The first book I read that wasn't a picture book was a very short book about King Arthur that was called, "Knights of the Round Table" as I recall, and around that time period I watched the movie "Sword in the Stone" over and over again and I also liked the movie "Prince Valiant" which is about a guy who's Norse and who goes to King Arthur's court to become a Knight of the Round Table(I think that's how the story goes).

[davefoc]

The presence of the Mad Linquist and Cleopatra have inspired me to tell one of my favorite stories. It has almost nothing to do with the subject of the thread so my apologies for that.

When tablets were found with writing on them in Mycenean archaeological digs the general consensus by scholars was that the people who wrote them weren't Greek because it was believed that the people who are in Greece today immigrated to the area at a later date.

With this in mind a number of scholars had made partial translations of the tablets, but nobody had succeeded in coming up with definitive translations.

Michael Ventris, a guy that spoke several languages, but who was only an amateur linquist, decided to take a shot at deciphering the tablets. Initially, using the conventional wisdom of the day that the lanquage of the tablets was not Greek, he made little progress. But at some point he decided to assume that ancient Greek was the lanquage that they were written in.

With this assumption he made considerable progress in translating the tablets and eventually published his findings. The work was widely rejected both because he was an amateur and because most professional archaeologists at the time believed that the Myceneans were not Greek. His work was also rejected because it conflicted with the tentative translations that had been made by the professionals.

But a while after he had published his works a large circle was discovered (in Tyros I think) that had linear B words and pictures of the corresponding items. The circles confirmed his translations although for awhile after the discovery there were some critics who tried to convince people that the earlier translations were on the right track.

A number of things appealed to me about this story. One of those was one of the words, tripodos, or tripod in English. So buried in the English lanquish was a word that could be traced back over 3200 years ago.

Unfortunately Michael Ventris was killed soon after the decipherment, in an automobile accident I think.

Mad Linquist, Cleopatra and other's comments and/or corrections would be qppreciated. Perhaps they could help me figure out why this has anything to do with a thread on Welsh.

[Lothian]

An amusing (well for me) aside to this debate is the Welsh language contains very few opportunities to swear, other that the equivalents of Jesus Christ or Bishop David.

It follows that listening to Welsh being spoken by the young consists of gobbledegook (or poetic melody depending on your view) interspersed with crude Anglo-Saxon. Very amusing.

[davefoc]

JAR, amazing, you're working on your middle English.

Perhaps you could expand on that a bit. Why? Could you give us a sample of middle English and perhaps the general dates that middle English was spoken? Do you have a feel for how it was pronounced? Could you speak it with a fellow middle English speaker (and would you understand each other)?

Also I was impressed by your Arthurian reading list. Which one of them did you enjoy the most? Which is most consistent with the Arthur legend that we know today?

Here's a link for a nice overview of various who was Arthur theories:

http://www.britannia.com/history/arthur/kaking.html

[CapelDodger]

From monkeymummy:
Please forgive me CapelDodger
All forguv. It gave me a chance to keep the old "Come home to a real fire - buy a cottage in Wales" thing going.

I hope nobody associates the weekend-cottage problem with holiday cottages which you rent by the week. The problem with the weekenders is that they arrive on Friday with a bootload of groceries they've picked at a hypermarket on the way, don't go down the pub and bugger off again on Sunday. You end up with ghost-villages which can't sustain shops or any community life. Tourists, on the other hand, spend locally and create jobs that mean the local economy can build new housing. Thusly they are seen in a completely different light, and friendliness is the natural reaction. I speak generally here, since I'm sure the problem is widespread even in the US; it certainly is in Brittany, where the night sky has also been lit up on occasion for the same reason.

It's made worse in Powys since so many of the weekenders are from Birmingham. There is no less melodious accent in the world than Brummie. Sorry Brummies, but there it is. Would that it weren't.

[jj]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
How do I manage to find myself, on the same thread, defending Welsh from the English and English from the Welsh?

I need a lie down.

Perhaps you're anglo'ed into a full Gael?

[jj]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
It's made worse in Powys since so many of the weekenders are from Birmingham. There is no less melodious accent in the world than Brummie. Sorry Brummies, but there it is. Would that it weren't.

I once knew a Loughborough person with a strong Cockney-like accent. Are you SURE there are no worse? :p

[CapelDodger]

From JAR:
Something with carriage-returns in it. Anyway, from what I've gleaned, you've read it all. Nennius and Godfrey pretty much cover the whole of the Arthurian thing. There really is very little source material left.

I recently read "Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms" by Alistair Moffat. It draws attention to the Romano-British presence on the Scottish border, and the strong possibility that its forces were withdrawn into Cumbria and Wales bringing with them their own threads of this tapestry. This raises the possibility that source material from that region might provide new insights.

One particularly picturesque story he brings up concerns a cavalry force based on Hadrian's wall since the 2nd CE. Moffat, I think, makes them Sarmatians from the steppes, but I've also heard of them being Numidians who had rebelled, regretted it and been shipped out to Hades Northumbriensis. These cavalry used lances (a damn fine cavalry weapon) and fixed tubular standards, like wind-socks, towards the top. When engaging in a charge they would hold the lances vertically and the wind would extend the tubes, which, painted and fitted with heads, appeared as dragons. Within the tube they fixed reeds, so that an eerie droning/roaring sound was produced. Given that and a bit of propaganda around the enemy camp-fires the previous night and fighting was seldom called for.

These were the people that held out on the borders for a while and then came to help the Welsh (against the Irish, not the Saisneg). Thus the Red Dragon of Wales. I like the story so much I "believe" it.

[Pak_43]

Apparently still not repealed in England are two local laws...

1.) You are allowed to shoot a Welshman with a bow and arrow caught inside the city walls of Chester after midnight.

2.) You can shoot a Welsh person all day Sunday, with a Longbow, in Hereford Cathedral Close.

:)

[CapelDodger]

From JJ:
I once knew a Loughborough person with a strong Cockney-like accent. Are you SURE there are no worse?
Sounds like you hit on a freak, like a five-legged frog. I never venture so close to Leicester, since the world might, one day, get an enema and that's where all the nastiness will happen.

I'm not anti-English, I'm just anti all the bits of England. Don't get me going on Kent (Garden of England, full of serpents). London's great, but it's not really England, it's trans-national. Liverpool is also a fine place, thanks to it's Irishness. Yorkshire is a country in itself.

Sorry, getting off-thread. To any who might care, the Welsh soccer team is playing Serbia in Belgrade tonight in the European Cup qualifiers. So far they're four from four, having beaten Italy in our magnificent Millenium Stadium. Yup, Italy. Almost takes your mind off the rugby - there's a "friendly" (!) against England this weekend, followed by melancholy songs.

[The Mad Linguist]

But if the Welsh fans stay true to national stereotype, they'll be very very melodious melancholy songs...

[Sundog]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
But if the Welsh fans stay true to national stereotype, they'll be very very melodious melancholy songs...

That's something I'm interested in too, besides the language. What traits do the Welsh share as a people? What traits in myself might be attributable to that?

I'm just wondering if any of the things that make me "me" are in any way linked to this lineage. In other words I was hoping to understand myself a little better with this clue...

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
But if the Welsh fans stay true to national stereotype, they'll be very very melodious melancholy songs...

What do you mean? I'd like to hear more about that! :)

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by CapelDodger


. London's great, but it's not really England, it's trans-national.

That's strange coming from you Capel Dodger, I thought that you were anti-nationalist and you would approve of this sort of cities( no pun intended).

[The Mad Linguist]

The main Welsh stereotypes are being good at singing and hating the English. Oh, and the coal-mining too. And all being called Jones. Williams is also a very common name. The truth in these stereotypes is variable. The steroetype involving the sheep has not one shred of truth to it at all, however, I'm reliably informed.

The Welsh also tend to be more left-wing politically than the English (the Conservative Party certainly struggles in Wales).

[rikzilla]

My brother-in-law is Welsh. My wife's sis married him in a farm valley (owned by his older brother) near Rhayader.

Lovely place Sundoggy,...you could do worse than be related to Arthur's people! :)

[The Mad Linguist]

Cleopatra, the Welsh are known for their good singing voices. It's a stereotype, as I've said, but there seems to be something to it at least - the Welsh Male Voice Choir is rightly famous, and a number of well-known classical singers are Welsh (quite a lot given the Welsh population is only about 4 million).

Plus the many luminaries from the world of pop music mentioned above who have good pairs of lungs on them...

Like the rest of the Celtic Fringe, Wales pulls cultural weight beyond its population.

[aerosolben]

Originally posted by Luciana Nery
The Mad Linguist, I'm really enjoying your input in this thread. In many other threads in the past I've argued against the common misconception that such and such languages are more complex than others. The only difference being is that you can explain better than I possibly could. I used to have many doubts regarding linguistics but now that you appeared I have, as luck would have it, forgotten them all. But when something comes up, I'll ask. :)

Meanwhile, I've been reading, delighted, your explanations, and wondering why the hell I had so many lousy professors in this subject, and why I didn't persevere when I had the opportunity. (Sigh.)

Allow me to recommend:

"The Story of Language" by Mario Pei

It's a pleasant read, and chock full of info for the amateur linguist. Armed with that, and some minor schooling from a Latin professor who had a linguistical bent, I knew everything (or just about everything) that Mad Linguist said in this thread before he said it. The author has also written other books specifically relating to English and Latin.

Perhaps the Mad Linguist himself can provide another resource.

editted to fix grammar

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
Cleopatra, the Welsh are known for their good singing voices. It's a stereotype, as I've said, but there seems to be something to it at least - the Welsh Male Voice Choir is rightly famous, and a number of well-known classical singers are Welsh (quite a lot given the Welsh population is only about 4 million).


Thank you Mad Linguist.

This reminds me of the "Golden Voices" of the Middle Ages that they were inhabiting the French court... and of course the "Academies of Happy Philosophy" in the southwest of France where they were teaching the art of love... but I do not think that such academies ever existed on the island of Great Britain :)

Bottom line: coal-mining does good to the lungs LOL

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by aerosolben
Perhaps the Mad Linguist himself can provide another resource.


Umm... [furiously thinks self into shoes of layman] David Crystal has written a few books that are quite comprehensive and not written for the specialist, but I don't know if he's been published outside the UK...

For heaven's sake, though, avoid Chomsky.

[CapelDodger]

From The Mad Linguist:
But if the Welsh fans stay true to national stereotype, they'll be very very melodious melancholy songs...
I've sung Myfanwy outdoors on a still night with half-a-dozen other drunks, three-part harmony, everybody knows the words and tune, and strong men are shedding tears. The non-locals were simply gob-smacked, since the singing started quite spontaneously. What else are you going to do on a hill around a bonfire with vittles and libations aplenty?

The tradition of singing is very real. On the school bus we sang all the way, just for fun. Rugby songs (utterly crude, but often hilarious), hymns, songs from Monty Python, Delilah (if you've ever heard a crowd of 50,000 in the Millenium Stadium singing Tom Jones's Delilah you have known true fear). Of course, in this increasingly homogenous world the practice may be dying out, but the evidence from the music world says otherwise. You can tell it in Cerys's voice; this is someone who has sung regularly since they were a toddler. (She's now a mother, with a girl called Glenys.) It's like breathing.

Singing with others is a very rewarding thing, especially in harmony.

Re the sheep thing (which may well be rewrding in its own way):

You can sing second bass in the village choir for twenty years, and do they call Jones the Choir? They do not. You can deliver the post for twenty years, and do they call you Jones the Post? They do not. You shag one sheep ...

[The Mad Linguist]

CapelDodger, since you know a bit about Cerys, perhaps you can tell me: is it true that the lyrics to International Velvet are a complete p***-take of all that is Welsh? I've heard it rumoured....

-sigh- I miss Catatonia, they were really good...

[JAR]

Originally posted by davefoc
JAR, amazing, you're working on your middle English.

Perhaps you could expand on that a bit. Why?
I've been learning Middle English because I find Middle English interesting.
Could you give us a sample of middle English and perhaps the general dates that middle English was spoken?
According to my World Book Encyclopedia article on the English Language, the Middle English period began about 1100 and ended about 1450.

Here's a sample of Middle English. It comes from John of Trevisa's 14th century translation of a 14th century book written in Latin called "Polychronicon" by Ranulph Higden. The section my sample comes from is called "The Languages of Britain." The book I got this excerpt from had a vocabulary at the end written by J.R.R. Tolkien. The book is called "14th Century Verse and Prose" edited by Kenneth Sisam. Forgive me if my translation is bad. I've change the "þ" to a "th" and this other letter that looks like a 3 to a "gh" to make things easier for me in writing this out.

Also Englyschmen, theygh hy hadde fram the bygynnyng thre maner speche, Southeron, Northeron, and Myddel speche in the myddel of the lond, as hy come of thre maner people of Germania, notheles by commyxstion and mellyng, furst with Danes and afterward with Normans, in menye the contray longage ys apeyred, and vseth strange wlaffyng, chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbittyng. This apeyryng of the burthtonge ys bycause of twey thinges. On ys for chyldern in scole, aghenes the vsage and manere of al other nacions, buth compelled for to leue here oune longage, and for to construe here lessons and here thinges a Freynsch, and habbeth suththe the Normans come furst into Engelond.

Translation: Also, Englishmen, though they had from the beginning three manners of speech, Southern, Northern and Middle speech in the middle of the land, as they came from three manners of people of Germany, nevertheless by intermingling and mingling, first with Danes and afterward with Normans, in many parts of the country, the language is damaged and uses strange stammering, chattering, snarling and a grating gnashing of the teeth. This damaging of the native speech is because of two things. One is because children in school, against the usage and manner of all other nations, are compelled to leave their own language, and to interpret their lessons and their compositions in French, and have since the Normans first came into England.
Do you have a feel for how it was pronounced?
No. When you see words being spelt in various different ways in one work of Middle English literature, it starts to become clear that the words aren't spelt all that phonetically. Not only that, the spelling of words in a Middle English work will differ from manuscript to manuscript.
Could you speak it with a fellow middle English speaker (and would you understand each other)?
No. I'm not that confident in my ability to speak and understand Middle English. Also I was impressed by your Arthurian reading list. Which one of them did you enjoy the most? Which is most consistent with the Arthur legend that we know today?
Of those books, the one I enjoyed the most was Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. Besides the story of King Arthur, it also contains the story of King Leir, which was made famous by William Shakespeare's play "King Lear."

The Arthurian book I read that is most consistent with modern Arthurian stuff is Le Morte d'Arthur.

[The Mad Linguist]

No. I'm not that confident in my ability to speak and understand Middle English.

Another point to make is that there was never a standard form of Middle English. It underwent great changes during the period it was spoken - particularly in terms of inflections. I sometimes think that ME is better considered as a transition period between Old English and Early Modern English than as a language in its own right.

Edit: And getting us back on topic, I've heard that the original story of King Lear was the story of Llyr, who was one of the Welsh Celtic gods (after Christianisation reconceived as a hero or ancestor figure rather than a god if I recall correctly...)

[CapelDodger]

There was a 3-part documentary series shown over here recently, presented by Eddie Izzard, called "Mongrel Nation", which explored the essentially melting-pot nature of England. In part one, I think, he set off to Jutland to buy a brown cow which would give good milk, armed only with Middle English. He met up with an initially bemused farmer, and before you know it they were discussing cheese and butter and the price of fish. Watch it if you get a chance.

[JAR]

Originally posted by Cleopatra
[snip]
of all the places I have visited in my life, in the four continents, it is Scotland that has stolen my heart for once and for good , another reason I didn't visit any other places in UK once I discovered Scotland.
[snip]
My favorite place that I've been to is Anza Borrego in southern California. It's a deserty area with palm trees and other green vegetation at occasional places where there are streams and other water sources.

Another great place to see in California is Temecula during springtime. During springtime it is a place with giant rolling hills covered with green grass. During the other parts of the year that I've been there though, the grass isn't green and instead is an ugly orangish yellow color. When it's not springtime, Temecula looks like a place that had an atomic bomb dropped on it. Unfortunately, one can't walk around on the green hills of Temecula though, because most of it is fenced off and much of it is private property used for cattle grazing. But you can see the green rolling hills when you're driving through the area.

[welshdean]

Sundog asked...
What traits do the Welsh share as a people? What traits in myself might be attributable to that?
I was reminded of this story;
A chap was sitting in a bar one night and a good looking woman sat next to him. They soon got talking and the subject of 'What women want from their man" came up. The beautiful woman responded that the "Welsh and Native American, were the two most sought after 'trophies' because of their attributes."
"Attributes?" Asked the chap.
"Yes, the Welsh are always running up and down mountains, singing all day. They develop huge lungs, when they 'go down' on a lady, they can hold their breath for weeks!!"
"..and the Native Americans, simply because they chase buffalo and wild horses all day they're supremely fit, hence, they can go for hours at a time."
The gentleman thanked her for the explanation and enquired, "I don't even know your name, please, what is it?"
"Brenda, Brenda Cooper, and your name is...?"
"Tonto, Tonto ap Griffith!!!"

[CapelDodger]

Early onset of melancholia. Serbia 1 Wales 0.

From sundog:
What traits do the Welsh share as a people? What traits in myself might be attributable to that?
It's crazy to think that your Welshness has any genetic meaning. If there is anything in Welshness which is reflected in you it is going to be because of your mother's nature. If there's anything in what I say that strikes a chord with you, you should talk to your mother about it and find out about her formative years.

The Welsh term for mother is Mam, as opposed to the English Mum and US Mom. She is, traditionally, passive dominant, which translates as wearing a shiny hat and throwing knives when necessary.

Did I mention that I was living in a miasma of melancholia and beer and companionship and shared ... something? Be warned. There's a flavour in Welshness that appears to outsiders as joy in gloom, but is, in my opinion, a desire for drama. Stupendous achievement or disastrous defeat, both can be sources of poetry. Wales's soccer team have won four from four on the way out, and could lose the back four, thus failing to qualify for Europe, and that would almost be as good as winning. Not as good, of course.

In the greater scale of things, the Welsh acceptance of defeat has served them well. Neither Wales nor Scotland can refuse the dominance of England. To attempt to do so is to invite destruction and disaster. The last Welsh nationalist rebellion - and more Welsh fought against it than fought for it - was Owain Glyndwr's against Henry IV, which was horribly destructive for great tracts of central Wales. Two generations later came Henry Twdr - otherwise known as Henry VII, born in Pembroke Castle and descended from Jasper Twdr, a Welshman.

Of course, that made no long-term difference to the dominance of the English plains, but on the other hand the Scots effectively did the same thing after Elizabeth I (James VI of Scotland, I of England) and were still beating themselves up in 1745. The Welsh had a prince called Llewellyn the Last. In the long-run there was no Welsh equivalent of the Duke of Cumberland beating the highlands.

I write as someone who only accepts the designation "human" (no nationality, no creed), so I don't call myself Welsh, but I was born here and moved to England at 16, which gave me a contrasting environment against which to view my culture. (I returned here, pretty much by chance, at 37, 12 years ago, and I can't imagine leaving. But that has as much to do with stage-of-life as anything else.)

To wander back to Mam:

The Welsh woman is powerful. In word-association, the commonest Welsh response to "Mam" is "Sorry". My mother admonished my brother and me at my sister's wedding (for something minor) and the woman I'd been closely associated with for a decade told me later "I think I'm starting to understand you". Mam is a scary beast. Paternalism is an empty boast round here. The amount of crap Mam takes defies Heisenberg. Hitler sent his bombers, and had he taken account of Mam? He had not, and look where he ended up.

My mother? I'll tell you about my mother ... (probable misquote from Bladerunner)

See any reflections there?

[welshdean]

this link, (http://www.welshrugbypics.co.uk/gallery/displayPicture.php?id=115) epitomises us Welsh. Care to watch the video, I would if I were you. Its here! (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/scrumv/media_2001/tries_gibbs_99.ram)
Stay away Anne, ya gringerbitch!

Coming to you from sunny Cardiff. I'm in St. Mellons CapelDodger, what about you?
My two bob,
The Mad Linguist said,
y is either "u" or "i"
What about 'e', as in 'Ty gwyn?
I ain't no linguist, I'm only asking?
:wink:

[welshdean]

this is Wales, Lake Vyrnwy.
Ain't she gorgeous.

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by welshdean

The Mad Linguist said,

What about 'e', as in 'Ty gwyn?
I ain't no linguist, I'm only asking?
:wink:

According to what I've read, the actual sound is schwa, which is hard to write in real letters (in phonetics we use an inverted "e"). "u" was an approximation for English-speaking readers...

[Shane Costello]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist:
Edit: And getting us back on topic, I've heard that the original story of King Lear was the story of Llyr, who was one of the Welsh Celtic gods (after Christianisation reconceived as a hero or ancestor figure rather than a god if I recall correctly...)

Lir (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lir) was the ancient Celtic god of the sea, and is best known in Ireland for the story of "The Children of Lir" (www.ireland-information.com/articles/thechildrenoflir.htm), one of the most noteworthy of Irish folk legends. His father was the sea-god Manannan Mac Lir. (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manannan_mac_Lir), who according to legend lived on the Isle of man, giving it it's name.

It should be noted that the Christianisation of Ireland was vital for the survival of ancient Celtic folklore. Christianisation brought with it writing and learning, facilitiating the recording of this folklore for posterity.

[Cleopatra]

Good morning Welsh Dean!

Is this photo from Wales? :eek: Are you sure you didn't steal it from this (http://www.santorini.gr) site? :)
Is Wales a female? Like Greece? :)

I am sorry about your football team Capel Dodger. From what I saw on TV your team lost a great opportunity to score after the first goal... You almost touched victory.

This almost, is the the aftertaste I get from your posts regarding Wales anyway.

Almost happy or melacholic ( it depends although in the Greek Orthodox Tradition melancholy is the only path that leads to true happiness), almost independant, almost victorious, almost spectacular from what I see on the photo ( gorgeous yes but not breathtaking) but certainly very matriarchal obviously to balance the almost situation...

Thank you for this post.

[The Mad Linguist]

Yup Shane, Lir is the Irish form, Llyr is the Welsh form. Same god. The "children of Llyr" is an important Welsh story too, if I recall correctly, but unless I'm mistaken the details are considerably different in the Welsh version than the version you cite...

And of course the Welsh version has the Children of Llyr as inhabitants of Britain rather than Ireland...

[CapelDodger]

Cleopatra:
I'm afraid you've misunderstood me about London. I really like it, and it's a prime example of the Great Cities model that I feel should replace nationalism. It's greatness doesn't rely on its Englishness - in fact I suspect a lot of people see London-ness as Englishness.

from The Mad Linguist:
CapelDodger, since you know a bit about Cerys, perhaps you can tell me: is it true that the lyrics to International Velvet are a complete p***-take of all that is Welsh? I've heard it rumoured....
I don't know any catatonics personally, excepting the ones I work for, but ain't that rock 'n' roll - trashing your background. She lives in Tennessee now, but hasn't cut herself off from Wales. She just had her baby here - there's a terribly cute picture of them on the cover of the Western Mail (http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/) today. Sadly they can't put the pictures on their site because they were taken on a one-use-only basis. But you can find a copy in the Library of Congress.

[Mr Manifesto]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
Cleopatra:
I'm afraid you've misunderstood me about London. I really like it, and it's a prime example of the Great Cities model that I feel should replace nationalism. It's greatness doesn't rely on its Englishness - in fact I suspect a lot of people see London-ness as Englishness.

from The Mad Linguist:

I don't know any catatonics personally, excepting the ones I work for, but ain't that rock 'n' roll - trashing your background. She lives in Tennessee now, but hasn't cut herself off from Wales. She just had her baby here - there's a terribly cute picture of them on the cover of the Western Mail (http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/) today. Sadly they can't put the pictures on their site because they were taken on a one-use-only basis. But you can find a copy in the Library of Congress.

But do you know what she's saying in International Velvet? None of the Welsh translations sites I've tried are any good (they either charge you or they can't recognise any of the words).

[CapelDodger]

From welshdean:
Coming to you from sunny Cardiff. I'm in St. Mellons CapelDodger, what about you?
You don't never tell no-one nuffin about yourself on the InterNet. East-central , south of Newport Road. No, not the prison, a little further than that.

Is that Old St Mellons?

[CapelDodger]

From Mr Manifesto:
But do you know what she's saying in International Velvet? None of the Welsh translations sites I've tried are any good (they either charge you or they can't recognise any of the words).
Sorry, haven't a clue. Could say much the same about most lyrics.

[Mr Manifesto]

These are the lyrics for any Welshies who care to translate them (or at least confirm that Lyrichunt.com have yet another bollixed set of lyrics on their site)

Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh

Gweledd o fedd gynhhyrfodd Cymraes swil
Darganfyddais gwir baradwys Rhyl

Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh

Deffrwch Cymry cysglyd, gwlad y gbn
Dwfn yw'r gwendid, bychan yw'r fflam

Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh
Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh
Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh
Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh
Thank the Lord I'm, thank the Lord I'm
Thank the Lord I'm Welsh.

[CapelDodger]

From Cleopatra:
Is Wales a female?
I've never thought about it. I think Wales is a dragon, gender unspecified. The national anthem is Land of Our Fathers, but which gender gets to choose national anthems?

[PygmyPlaidGiraffe]

I am sorry. Consolations.

Just kidding :)

I myself am from Cumbria. (Land of the Cymru). I don't have a lot of information on Wales and Cumbria's historical connection to Wales.

[Cleopatra]

Capel Dodger:
I've never thought about it. I think Wales is a dragon, gender unspecified. The national anthem is Land of Our Fathers, but which gender gets to choose national anthems?

I only asked because Welsh Dean referred to Wales as "she".

For what it worths, in the Greek language the proper noun Wales( Ουαλλια ) is feminine. London is neutral, like Israel.

[PygmyPlaidGiraffe]

The origin of the word Wales is a strange one. It is a variation on a common word used hundreds of years ago by the Anglo-Saxons to mean foreigners or outsiders. Variations of the same word can be found in other countries, such as Walloon part of Belgium. Since this word is one given to the principality by the Anglo-Saxons rather than by ourselves, it could be argued that Cymru (meaning friends/companions) is a preferable one to Wales, although the origins are long enough in the past for us to be equally proud of both names today. Interestingly, a variation on Cymru can also be found outside the Principality, as the name of the northern English county of Cumbria has similar linguistic origins.

Q & A about Wales (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/about/historyfaq.shtml)

[tedly]

Originally posted by JAR


Predictable European response.

English, the language of the first Americans, Irony meter hits the peg, Bwa haa haa

Please remember that when the first Europeans arrived the largest city on the continent would hold that record until New York overtook it in 1890.

Smallpox is still the most effective colonial conqueror in history.

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by Mr Manifesto
These are the lyrics for any Welshies who care to translate them (or at least confirm that Lyrichunt.com have yet another bollixed set of lyrics on their site)

I think there's more than that... the verses are considerably longer than just two lines each...

Great. Now I'm obsessed. I won't be able to sleep till I've sorted this out in my head...

Edit: googled and found the full thing, and a posited translation that looks really, really bad to me...

Deffrwch Cymru cysglyd gwlad y gan
= Wake up sleepy Wales, land of song
Dwfn yw'r gwendid bychan yw y fflam
= Strong is the weakness but tiny is the flame
Creulon yw'r crynhaeaf ond per yw'r don
= Cruel is the harvest but sweet is the tune
'Da' alaw'r alarch unig yn ddyfron
= With the song of the lonely swan in my chest
Everyday when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh
Gwledd o fedd gynhyfodd Cymraes swil
= A feast of graves excited a shy Welsh woman
Darganfyddais gywir baradwys Rhyl
= I discovered the true paradise of Rhyl
Everyday when I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh

I still think there's some lines missing, so I'm going to dig up my album sleeve when I get home...

[jj]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
Yup Shane, Lir is the Irish form, Llyr is the Welsh form. Same god. The "children of Llyr" is an important Welsh story too, if I recall correctly, but unless I'm mistaken the details are considerably different in the Welsh version than the version you cite...

And of course the Welsh version has the Children of Llyr as inhabitants of Britain rather than Ireland...

But whatever you do, don't get stuffed into a big bag! :p

[The Mad Linguist]

The bit that freaked me out was where Bran got his head cut off and it didn't die.

Oh, and all that with the horses... {sigh} they just don't make bloodthirsty legends like they used to!

[CapelDodger]

The Mad Linguist:
Welsh is very allusive. Being allusive means you can be wordy and concise at the same time. Wales, like Ireland, produces a high proportion of poets and writers, so the potential for allusivity expands exponentially.

Whatever the Welsh meaning, the refrain has become something of an anthem, with no ironic intent. It has the benefit of simplicity and a natural sway-side -to-side rate resonant with the average drunken crowd. And it's unresolved.

[TomStockholm]

Mad Linguist.

I would also like to say that I appreciate your imput here. As someone who studied linguistics to a reasonable level without finishing (a long story) it is refreshing to hear you explaining this stuff in a clear concise way.
I don't want to derail this thread too much but I have a little question about the following regarding tenses.



Originally posted by The Mad Linguist


Well, to take French as an example, you have:

je regarde
je regardais
je regarderai
je regarderais

(someone correct me if that's wrong, it's been a while since I did French verbs!)

The tenses are Present, Imperfect, Future and Conditional respectively (now if you really want to get technical you can start on the differences between Tenses, Aspects and Moods, but that's another story). English doesn't have the last three of these tenses, so we achieve the same meanings using auxiliary verbs (extra verbs that don't mean very much but change the grammar of the main verb). So:

je regarde -- I watch
je regardais -- I was watching
je regarderai -- I will watch
je regarderais -- I would watch

If English had a future tense, it would basically package up the meaning of "will watch" into a single word. But it doesn't have one, and it's not likely to for many centuries at the very least.

Something I have wondered about is what it is that says that the term "will watch" ISN'T one word? If we hypothesise English as solely a spoken language without a written language then surely a phrase like "I will watch" could just as easily be "I willwatch" and be classed as future tense just like French? Isn't our classification of all this stuff almost totally dependent on how we choose to arrange our language symbolically when we develop our written languages?

Badly explained, but I hope you understand what I mean. I would be interested to know what you think of this.

Again sorry about derailing...

[CapelDodger]

I can see traits of Welshness going back through the medieval, the Romano-British and the Celts, but it seems to fly in the face of the huge influx of people into South Wales during the 19CE. Today the population of South Wales - which doesn't include Pembroke - is 2 million, with half a million in the rest. Before 1800 the south was only marginally more industrialised than the rest of the country. People moved in because the Industrial Revolution just loved those great ports and easily accessible valleys full of coal and iron-ore. They moved into a new place, a new way of living and working that was unprecedented and constantly evolving - it should have blown any traces of the previous culture away.

But I think certain coincidences have prevented that. Firstly, many of the early incomers wer from Cornwall, where the tin mines have been dying of the same heart-attack for five hundred years. Apart from them having Celtic traits, they were craftsmen who carried with them the ancient spirit of the guild. That spirit teaches that no-one can whip a tradesman to his work. The Welsh spirit teaches that the landlord is no better than you, and there's always the option of the forests and the hills.

Follow that with the influx of Irish during the famine and the Saxon serf-dudes pushed off the land by the Agricultural Revolution had no influence. The Welsh absorbed them like the Chinese absorbed the Mongols. It took some work to get to that comparison.

So the love-affair of the Welsh with words, and cleverness with words, goes back a long way. We could go into entire threads discussing the Celtic Church, but something the Celts of Britain took from the Romans during their long presence was the idea of law and lawyers. A whole new way to be clever with words. But also a way for a family to be as good as any other - before the law.

Imagine the depth of contempt that the Romano-Britons felt for the invading Saxons. These people were ruled by thugs with arbitrary power. Their technology was laughable, they stank, they were illiterate. They were also, of course, overwhelming, which is why the Welsh are the last remnant - in the last resort, there's the forests and the hills. But right down through those times comes a respect for education, a love of language and cleverness, and an egalitarianism.

Of course, it's all going to the dogs these days. Not like in my days.

[Soapy Sam]

For a well researched and well written fictional treatment of the Welsh legend of Arthur, I highly recommend "The Crystal Cave", by Mary Stewart and it's two successors, "The Hollow Hills" and "The Last Enchantment" . The fourth novel, "The Wicked Day", I enjoyed rather less.

As far as Welsh culture goes, I'm surprised to see no mention of Dafyd Iwan or Plethyn. (If there's been a better singer in the last twenty years in all Celtdom than Linda Healey, it can only be Karen Mathieson of Capercaillie).

On food- how could you forget "Cowl"? (I apologise for the spelling, I'm going on phonetics here).

Forget the whisky. Sorry, but I'm Scottish. Some excellent beer though.
Felin Foel Double Dragon?
Or Brains S.A. for that matter?

As Ian Anderson once said, when the Welsh had just hammered Scotland at Murrayfield- "It's not lost, what a friend gets."

The fundamental purpose of England is to form a land bridge between Wales and Scotland.

[JAR]

Originally posted by tedly
Irony meter hits the peg, Bwa haa haa

Please remember that when the first Europeans arrived the largest city on the continent would hold that record until New York overtook it in 1890.

Smallpox is still the most effective colonial conqueror in history.
What's ironic about what I said?

[Shane Costello]

The surname Walsh is one of the most common in Ireland, and in Irish translates as Breathnach, which literally means "Welsh" (which is also a colloquial pronunciation of Walsh in much of the country). The surname came into the country with the Norman invasion, since the Normans who came into the country were from South Wales, and brought with them many Welsh followers.

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by TomStockholm

Something I have wondered about is what it is that says that the term "will watch" ISN'T one word? If we hypothesise English as solely a spoken language without a written language then surely a phrase like "I will watch" could just as easily be "I willwatch" and be classed as future tense just like French? Isn't our classification of all this stuff almost totally dependent on how we choose to arrange our language symbolically when we develop our written languages?

The notion of the word is indeed a slippy one. But in the case of English, it's not just the writing system that tells us "will" and "watch" are two separate words. We know they are separate words because they can move around the sentence indepentently, e.g. you can insert an adverb (he will soon watch), or invert it to form a question (will he watch?). Tense affixes, by contrast, are fixed with respect to their verb and cannot wander around the sentence on their own. It's also possible to stress "will" (he WILL come) whereas tense affixes can't usually be stressed in this way.

So "will" is definitely an independent word in today's English. Whether it still will be in tomorrow's English is another question. Auxiliary verbs tend to become more fixed and affix-like as time goes on. This is where tenses come from in the first place (e.g. French future tense derives, I believe, from an originally independent form of "avoir", "to have").

But there are cases where your point applies, i.e. only the writing system tells us whether it's one word or two. For example, the Hindi-Urdu language is written in two alphabets, Arabic (Urdu) and Devanagari (Hindi). The interesting thing is that there's sometimes disagreement about where the word boundaries are. So the phrase "unhõne" (meaning "by them", roughly) is unhõne in Hindi and unhõ ne (two words) in Urdu. Because the syntax doesn't allow anything to occur between "unhõ" and "ne", it becomes very difficult to tell whether they're one word or not.

[CapelDodger]

From Soapy Sam:
The fundamental purpose of England is to form a land bridge between Wales and Scotland.
There's a Polish joke about a man who gets three wishes. He asks that Poland be occupied by the Chinese three times. When asked why, he points out that they'd have to march across Russia six times. With that in mind, our Scottish friends are always welcome.:)

[welshdean]

Cleopatra asked;
Is Wales a female? Like Greece?
Well that depends. Is greece beautiful? Does it tug at your heart when you're away from it? Do you fail to hold back the tears when you hear it's song? Do you yearn to be back in it's bosom? Does the beauty of all other places pail into insignificance when compared to it's own majesty?
If the answer is yes to all of these questions, then yes, I am confident that Greece is also a female, but not as magnificent an example as Wales.

CapelDodger said;
East-central , south of Newport Road. No, not the prison, a little further than that.
So that's got to be Adamsdown, maybe the very edge of Splott. Ever go in the Railway Club, or the Cottage? I watch most of the Welsh games in the Cottage. Including the famous england v Wales Clash in 1999, Go on Scotty, my son.

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by welshdean
Cleopatra asked;

Well that depends. Is greece beautiful? Does it tug at your heart when you're away from it? Do you fail to hold back the tears when you hear it's song? Do you yearn to be back in it's bosom? Does the beauty of all other places pail into insignificance when compared to it's own majesty?
If the answer is yes to all of these questions, then yes, I am confident that Greece is also a female, but not as magnificent an example as Wales.


:) :) :)

[JAR]

Originally posted by Shane Costello


Lir (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lir) was the ancient Celtic god of the sea, and is best known in Ireland for the story of "The Children of Lir" (www.ireland-information.com/articles/thechildrenoflir.htm), one of the most noteworthy of Irish folk legends. His father was the sea-god Manannan Mac Lir. (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manannan_mac_Lir), who according to legend lived on the Isle of man, giving it it's name.
[snip]
Ah, yes. I've read that story. I read it in "Irish Folk and Fairy Tales" by W.B. Yeats. In that book it has a slightly longer title of "The Fate of the Children of Lir."

[davefoc]

JAR, thanks for your answers to my questions about middle English.

A few comments:
It was closer to modern English than I had expected. Old English is so different than modern English that its hard to see at first glance that the language is the basis for modern English.

I notice your date for middle English starts a little after the Norman conquest and lasts about 350 years. I suppose this was a period of relatively quick change for English as the language of the Normans melded with the existing English to form modern English.

[Cleopatra]

Welsh Dean, since I appreciate the beauty of words and of poetry more than the natural beauty, I am mostly glad that this bizarre "beauty contest" gave you the nomination for the language award. :)

[CapelDodger]

Cleopatra:

Thinking on it, the first contact the Greeks had with Wales (which was all of Celtic Britain in those days) would have been with Cornwall, where they could trade for tin, zinc, lead, a little silver and such; from Wales proper would have come gold (yes, there's gold in them there hills). A mysterious place which provides good things would be female, of course. I'm guessing that places where bad things come from - like the Scythians - will be male?

From welshdean:
Ever go in the Railway Club, or the Cottage? I watch most of the Welsh games in the Cottage. Including the famous england v Wales Clash in 1999, Go on Scotty, my son.
The Cottage is currently closed; I gather a tenancy, with refurbishment, is available. A planning application is currently in to demolish the Railway Club and erect student accomodation on the site. If you're interested in a future in the pub trade, now might be a good time to take up that tenancy.

Adamsdown is it. Did you have to mention the S word? They'll all be sniggering now.

[Cleopatra]

I don't know Capel Dodger, do you refer to some specific historical contact or it's one of "those" contacts ? :)

I do not think that the sources of bad things are of male gender though, it's just that none writes poems-- like the one Welsh Dean wrote -- for males, that's all!

[JAR]

Originally posted by Cleopatra
I don't know Capel Dodger, do you refer to some specific historical contact or it's one of "those" contacts ? :)
[snip]
See this link and scroll down till you see the article titled "Cassiterides": http://10.1911encyclopedia.org/C/CA/CASSITERIDES.htm

[Sundog]

The wealth of knowledge represented by the people here never ceases to amaze me. Thanks, everyone, keep it up. :)

[Cleopatra]

Thank you JAR!!!!

I had no idea!!

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by davefoc
It [Middle English] was closer to modern English than I had expected. Old English is so different than modern English that its hard to see at first glance that the language is the basis for modern English.

Old English looks a lot like German to most people. This is a fairly accurate perception because it IS a lot like German. Middle English looks a lot like Modern English on paper. This is because English spelling was pretty much frozen in the late Middle English period. (Some of) the bizarre spellings of Modern English are frequently pretty close to phonetic in Middle English. This means that Middle English would seem a lot more alien if you actually heard it pronounced.

The other thing you can't tell just from the way Middle English looks is that it still had the last remnants of the Old English inflecitonal system (doesn't always show up in the spelling...) which is a big difference between ME and MnE.

I suppose this was a period of relatively quick change for English as the language of the Normans melded with the existing English to form modern English.

It certainly was a period of very swift change - not all of it directly due to the influence of Norman French. For a start there was the Great Vowel Shift (which is responsible for many of the crazy spellings). Then you had the (mostly-) fixing of the word order, the rise of auxiliary verbs, and - above all - the disappearance of many of the inflections. This last had already started in Old English, perhaps as a result of the Viking incursions. The influence of Norman French may have been largely indirect: because NF was the language of government, there was no standard form of English in the ME period to put a brake on all this change.

Of course, English also absorbed lots of Norman French vocabulary once the Normans finally started to learn to use English...

[tedly]

Originally posted by JAR

What's ironic about what I said?
The irony is that it is only the Europeans (who explored this continent by discovering towns where they were invited for lunch) that think that English was the language of the first americans.
Also overlooking the fact that even then the first 'language' - since only civilized people have language- was Spanish.
Truly the meter not only pegs, it bounces.

[CapelDodger]

JAR:
Thank you. Cleopatra: I was referring to very early classical contacts, and hints that there was pre-Greek Minoan trade. The Cartheginians (ex-Minoans?) dominated trade past Gadiz in their days, but there was indirect trade via Brittany and overland to the Greek city of Marseilles. It was the Greeks that manipulated Rome into destroying Carthage because they prefered ship-travel to mules. There are old Jewish connections with Cornish tin as well. One of these statements I made up.

[The Mad Linguist]

I know! I know! It's the one about {ssssh you mustn't spoil it for the others...}

The Carthaginians were Phoenicians, not Minoans. The Minoans were long gone by then if I recall correctly...

[CapelDodger]

Mad Linguist: I've just bought Western Languages AD 100-1500 by Philippe Wolff; gird your loins. To quote from the blurb: "From Cicero to Gutenberg ..." - seems quite a challenge for 187 pages.

[JAR]

Originally posted by tedly

The irony is that it is only the Europeans (who explored this continent by discovering towns where they were invited for lunch) that think that English was the language of the first americans.
Also overlooking the fact that even then the first 'language' - since only civilized people have language- was Spanish.
Truly the meter not only pegs, it bounces.
It appears we have a mix-up here. You are thinking of the word "American" in it's geographical sense. You apparently mistakenly thought that by "American", I meant "an inhabitant of the Americas."

By "American" I mean the people who live under the government of the United States of America and who lived in the American colonies owned by Britain that became the United States of America.

In the modern world, the latter definition I gave for the word "American" is used much more often than the former.

[Edited to add: Did you actually think I was stupid enough to think that the first settlers of the Americas were Englishmen?]

[JAR]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
I know! I know! It's the one about {ssssh you mustn't spoil it for the others...}

The Carthaginians were Phoenicians, not Minoans. The Minoans were long gone by then if I recall correctly...
And the Phoenician ethnic group was a later form of the Canaanite ethnic group.

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
I know! I know! It's the one about {ssssh you mustn't spoil it for the others...}

Hey!!! What is the plot here? What are you plotting you two, I want to know :)

The Carthaginians were Phoenicians, not Minoans. The Minoans were long gone by then if I recall correctly...

Yes this is true. We know very few about the origin of the Minoans, they were not Greeks for sure( probably they have invented the alphabet on behalf of the Greeks by evoling their script ( Linear A )but do not tell this to a Greek nationalist...) Thucidetes makes a vague reference to them as being " people of the sea". With this term he describes the people that came from Middle East.

As you know Mad Linguist our Aegean Sea is not an ocean but a pelagos, that means a sea route that connects people and civilizations :)

It seems that we are remote cousins with the Welsh.

Some things make sense now ...

[JAR]

Originally posted by Cleopatra
Thank you JAR!!!!

I had no idea!!
To say more on this subject, as I recall, the first known Greek to go to Britain was Pytheas of Marseilles. It's from him that we get the word "Britain" and he might have got it from the name that the inhabitants of Britain used for Britain.

This page talks about him: http://home.t-online.de/home/nikolaus.urban/pytheas.html

[CapelDodger]

from The Mad Linguist:
The Carthaginians were Phoenicians, not Minoans. The Minoans were long gone by then if I recall correctly...
But who were the Phoenicians? The Sea-People from the Aegean, with advanced ship-technology and a major impact from nothing? A few generations after Vulcan did his gig on Santorini? It was the resurgence of the Minoans, surely. With a rather more militaristic culture - after all, if that's what happens to you when you're peaceful and cultured it's carpe diem from now on.

[CapelDodger]

I applaud Pytheas, and I'm sure he was better-mannered than many British tourists are in Greece these days. (I blame Saxon parenting.)

[The Mad Linguist]

The Phoenicians were a Semitic people. The Minoans, so far as I recall, weren't. I've certainly never seen any suggestion that the two were linked...

Edited ot add: and surely it was more than "a few generations"?

Cleopatra must know a bit more about this...

[Cleopatra]

Phoenicians are a mystery. According to some theories they didn't even have a "country" but they were inhabiting the trade ports of eastern mediterranean. According to others they occupied the area of today's Palestine ( well, tomorrow's Palestine).

We don't have a phoenician pottery , if you know what does this mean.Archaeologically, we cannot talk about a phoenician civilization.

We know for sure though that they are the grandparents of the western alphabet. Minoans who had commercial relationship with them took the idea of alphabet from them.

Thanks for the reference of Pytheas JAR.

You see, if you are curious, you go as far as Britain :)

[The Mad Linguist]

No, I know that's wrong with regard to the alphabet. It was the Greeks who adopted the Phoenician alphabet. The Minoans were long gone by that point (and they used a completely different type of writing anyway).

One thing I do know about the Phoenicians is that they are the people referred to as "Philistines" in the Bible...

[CapelDodger]

From JAR:
And the Phoenician ethnic group was a later form of the Canaanite ethnic group.
That really doesn't work for me. Unless we go back to a possible generic semitic background for the Minoans and Canaanites (which is quite possible at six or seven thousand years ago) there isn't any connection. The Canaanites were that part of the ancient population which adopted arable, city-based ways of life along the fertile coasts of the East Med. By the start of recorded history they had a culture based on cities ruled by a warrior class that maintained a monopoly on warfare. These were the Hyksos, who ruled northern Egypt from the 17-something BCE to about 1550 BCE as I recall (they introduced the chariot to Egypt). There's no hint of serious maritime interest. The Egyptians refer to the Phoenicians, who erupted onto the scene some while later, in completely different terms to those used for the Canaanites. Archaeology indicates that the Canaanites were taken by surprise just as much as the Egyptians were.

By the time of David, say 1000BCE, you find Hyram of Tyre as the senior partner in a Hebrew-Phoenician alliance which controls the East Med to Red Sea trade routes, and the Phoencians controlling all trade westwards into the Med. Just like the Minoans before them. By then the Canaanites were toast.

[The Mad Linguist]

I didn't even know "Canaanite" was a well-defined civilisation. Although I believe the evidence suggests whoever they were, they were Semites.

CapelDodger - the Phoenicians were definitely Semites. If you're arguing that the Phoenicians were Minoans, then it follows that the Minoans were Semites. Which I don't buy.

Cleopatra - there is no line of descent between Linear A and the Greek alphabet. Linear A was used by the Minoans, which probably inspired Linear B used by the Mycenaeans. But then the Mycenaean civilisation fell, and Greek was left without a writing system until it adopted the Phoenician alphabet some centuries later.

Gah... off home now. More tomorrow...

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
No, I know that's wrong with regard to the alphabet. It was the Greeks who adopted the Phoenician alphabet. The Minoans were long gone by that point (and they used a completely different type of writing anyway).

One thing I do know about the Phoenicians is that they are the people referred to as "Philistines" in the Bible...

Yes the Greeks were indeed those who adopted it but since the Greek alphabet comes from Linear A there is a theory according to which Minoans after Capel Dodger's friend, Vulcus, destroyed their Palaces, migrated to the Mycenan Palaces and developed the alphabet. But this is just at theory.

Well, we are not sure that the Philistines of the Bible were the Phoenicians. We have some pottery from the Philistines but we cannot relate them to the Phoenicians with certainty.

Since you mention it, Palestinians regard Philistines as their remote ancestors but this theory has a lot of holes...

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
Cleopatra - there is no line of descent between Linear A and the Greek alphabet. Linear A was used by the Minoans, which probably inspired Linear B used by the Mycenaeans. But then the Mycenaean civilisation fell, and Greek was left without a writing system until it adopted the Phoenician alphabet some centuries later.

Gah... off home now. More tomorrow...

Yes this is what I tried to say, maybe I was clearer to my last post.

I think that I am going to bed too. Mouches to everybody :)

[CapelDodger]

From The Mad Linguist:
and surely it was more than "a few generations"?
I was leaning on poetic licence a little hard. All the same, given the devastation that must have been caused by Thera the idea of a resurgence at the time of the Sea-People is tenable. The remnants - still carrying a lot of knowledge - may have built a new economy and culture in the islands and coasts of the Eastern Aegean without drawing much attention to themselves. Every generation after Thera would have inherited the knowledge and technology not only of Minoa but of the succeeding generations. And they would have seen each generation after Thera more prosperous than the last, which after six or so generations gives a culture massive cojones. At a certain tipping-point they decide to stop farting around and bingo - the Phoenicians. Never large in numbers, but well-equpped, clever and aware of a fundamental truth.

It's all about business.

[CapelDodger]

From Cleopatra:
Since you mention it, Palestinians regard Philistines as their remote ancestors but this theory has a lot of holes...
Masterly understatement.

[Soapy Sam]

Covering some ground here, are we not? From hiraeth to Hannibal in one cultural swoop.

Santorini seems to have been a Minoan colony. Most people appear to have got off the island before the eruption.(Not many bodies found). I imagine most of them went to Crete. The fires at Knossos were probably linked to the volcano, but who knows, really? Could be the social pressure of those migrants coming home caused political instability at a bad time. Cultures recover from that sort of disaster pretty fast and any ships at sea would have survived. Only those in harbour would be lost.

It's still a lovely island. Very, very spectacular. And not like Wales at all. (Though the geology and scenery of Wales is a lot more varied than Santorini's).

I recall the friezes in the Athens museum show a people who don't look very semitic to me. The folks around the west end of Crete show similar physiognomy even today. (I'd describe the noses as "Mayan" - I doubt the emigrants went that far.)

I do wonder where they went. What if some of them took their high tech ships and tools to the distant west and became the Tuatha de Danaan out in the old islands of tin, peat ,mist and whisky?

Nice notion, if kind of hard to prove. Maybe one day DNA evidence will prove Sundog is really descended from the Minoans.

Meanwhile, what's so bad about just being plain, vanilla American?

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by Cleopatra

Since you mention it, Palestinians regard Philistines as their remote ancestors but this theory has a lot of holes...

Of course the Palestinians are the descendants of Phoenicians. They're also the descendants of Egyptians, Syrians, Canaanites, Akkadians, Romans, Greeks, Hebrews, Arabs, and every other tribe to troop through that little warzone over the millennia. That's what you might call "background population".

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
It's all about business.

I'm afraid I don't buy it. The scenario you outline is certainly theoretically possible. But here are a few of the reasons I'm immediately sceptical:

1) A civilisation developed unnoticed???
2) The Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language. We don't know what language the Minoans spoke but the fact they wrote it in Linear A strongly suggests it wasn't Semitic.
3) I've never heard that the Phoenicians were noted for Bull-Worship.

If there is any evidence for the link beyond conjecture, fair enough. But a priori it doesn't seem likely.

[Cleopatra]

...walks through the relics of the debauchery that took place in this thread last night holding a cup or strong black coffee...

My my my... what have we done here last night ? :) From Wales to Santorini chasing the roots of Palestinians...

Soapy Sam. When I was a student at the University I took part for a summer, in the archaeological expedition in Akrotiri- the Minoan city of Santorini.

The director was Sir Colin Renfrew who has written -among other things- a fascinating book, "In search of the Indo-europeans, Archaeology, Language and Myth".

During the evenings after work we gathered around a map of the Mediterranean and everybody had to narrate his theory, regarding the movements of the populations. "Everything" was accepted and since a lot of Laphroaig was involved, you could hear to some really interesting theories :)

Sir Colin would love Capel Dodger's theory although the later would have some difficulties to support it.

The concept Capel Dodger is correct but I do not think that it applies to this case.

Sir Colin was from Scotland and he had theories that connected Greeks to Scots... If he were Welsh he would find a way to connect Greeks with Wales and now I realize that if he were Welsh he would do better with words, poetry and therefore with courting...

What so ever, all I want to say is that the crazy theories we post here are not THAT crazy.

Mad Linguist I totally agree with the way you approach the origin of the Palestinians!! I hope that JAR who is a college student took notes and got the meaning ;)

Capel Dodger

Moi:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since you mention it, Palestinians regard Philistines as their remote ancestors but this theory has a lot of holes...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You
-----------------------------------------------
Masterly understatement.
-----------------------------------------------

Is this a pun? My phrase didn't have a hidden political meaning. You know , mon cher, all people do not have your "dirty mind" :p

[CapelDodger]

Cleopatra: Not a pun, just a cliche, I'm afraid, for when you emphasise your statement by under-emphasizing it.

(By the way, I don't personally take any interest in rugby. Ever again. Fortunately the game was on Sky pay-per-view so I didn't have to watch it.)

The Mad Linguist: That's where stream-of-conciousness gets me. I now realise that the current acccepted date for Thera is 1626/7BCE, not the 1460BCE date I read long ago. In which case the Minoans could at most have been an early influence on the Sea People's culture.

One thing the Minoans would have known is where to buy at wholesale prices and how to get there, quite rare knowledge that would have been carefully guarded. That would have given the "Phoenicean" people a good start.

[CapelDodger]

From The Msd Linguist:
3) I've never heard that the Phoenicians were noted for Bull-Worship.
Thera might have convinced the Minoans it didn't work.

From Cleopatra:
Sir Colin was from Scotland and he had theories that connected Greeks to Scots
The Scots were Egyptian. I learnt that from a book on my idiocy shelf called Kingdom of the Ark ; apparently Princesss Scota, beautiful but tragic daughter of Akhenaten, fled to Ireland (?) with the secrets of the woo-woo and she and her followers formed a clan called the Scots, who subsequently invaded Scotland. The last part is right, the Scots were invaders from Ireland who ultimately saw off the Picts. The rest contains a number of holes ...

You might be amused by Where Once Stood Troy , a disturbingly persuasive argument that Homer was a Celt and the Trojan War took place in the North Sea. In this scheme of things Troy was situated in Cambridge (a bold claim, I think). The core of the argument is that the Odyssey is actually a set of navigational instructions, a mnemonic for sailors. It certainly could be, but the travel times and directions don't fit. However if you assign the place-names in Homer to places around the Netherlands and East Anglia it does fit. Well there's a thing. Anyway, subsequently these Celts migrate to the Aegean bringing the stories with them and transfer their familiar place-names to the new location. Implying a pretty direct trip across France and the Alps and down the Danube. Great fun, but I wouldn't pay full price for it.

Randi is on Channel 4 at 9 tonight, in Ultimate Psychic Challenge .

[Cleopatra]

I have heard the story that Troy was in today's Cambridge and that the Trojan war took place in the Northern Sea but as I have said to a dear friend who narrated me this version, one should be very careful when he interacts with Greeks and their culture because he can easily find himself haunted by the Greek Spirit.

I suggest to all of you stay away from my beloved hero, Ulysses, before I get really mad :)

One reads the verses of Odyssey and can smell the Mediterranean on Ulysse's skin...

The meter of Homer's poetry is identical to the rhythm of the sea I can hear down the cliffs right now...

Go away! :)

[The Mad Linguist]

I strongly suspect that Renfrew's ideas about the relationship between Greeks and Scots were significantly less woo-woo-ish than shifting the Odyssey to the North Sea...

Certain myths and historical personages just seem to cluster idiots around them... e.g. Atlantis... e.g. one of Velikovsky's less known idiocies is that the character of Oedipus is actually based on Akhnaten and IT ALL REALLY HAPPENED... hah yeah right.

To get the thread back on topic, does anyone know of this kind of revisionism going on with the Welsh-Celtic myths? I know a lot of modern authors do pretty radical reworkings of the Arthurian mythos but that doesn't count as it comes labelled as fiction...

[Shane Costello]

There is actually some solid evidence for links between the Celtic church and the Far East. Comparisons have been drawn between Celtic art and Coptic art. The Celtic church seems to have been influenced by Eastern, rather than Roman Christianity. Irish television did a series on this, and cited among other things the presence of a Welsh mountain called Cader Idris, Idris apparently being a mythical North African figure.

Randi posing as a psychic on C4 right now!

[The Mad Linguist]

"Idris" is Welsh for "Arthur", Shane... although Celtic Christianity was indeed more similar to the Orthodox tradition than to Catholicism.

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist
although Celtic Christianity was indeed more similar to the Orthodox tradition than to Catholicism.

I'd like to hear more about that !!

[The Mad Linguist]

I don't know much about it.

All I know about it, I learnt in the context of the conversion of the English.

The Britons and the Irish were converted prior to the Anglo-Saxons coming to Briton. This Celtic Church was centred on Iona (island near Scotland) if I recall correctly.

The Celtic Church's apostolic tradition was supposed to go back to St John (Cleopatra, is this true of the Eastern Church too?) whereas the Roman Church is supposed to go back to St Peter. This is the rationalisation.

As for actual details, the Celtic Church used the same method as the Eastern Church for calculating the date of Easter... and I've heard that the monks wore their tonsures like the Eastern Church rather than like the Roman Church. There may have been other similarities, but I can't recall them just now.

Anyway, the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons left a large population of pagans with one Church (Rome) to the south and another (Celtic) to the north and west. Both made attempts to convert the English. There was a synod at Whitby in Yorkshire where Oswy the King of Northumbria summoned both representatives of both churches to present their cases, so that he could choose which version of Christianity he would follow. He chose Rome, largely for political reasons if I recall correctly. So England became Catholic. Ireland, Wales and Scotland were converted from Celtic christianity to Catholicism sometime after that (not sure when).

[Shane Costello]

Originally posted by The Mad Linguist:
"Idris" is Welsh for "Arthur", Shane... although Celtic Christianity was indeed more similar to the Orthodox tradition than to Catholicism.

I see. FWIW the documentary in question was interesting, and while the emphasis was somewhat biased on establishing the links, it was far from being a woo-woo fest. It's a plausible enough theory, in my view. In hindsight my claim of "solid evidence" was erroneous.

Originally posted by Cleopatra:
I'd like to hear more about that !!

Celts and Orthodoxy (www.orthodoxireland.com/history/celtsandorthodoxy/view)

Evidence of Egyptian monks in medieval Ireland (www.orthodoxireland.com/history/monksfromegypt/view)

Randi is handing out personality analyses to the studio audience. They're all the same, but quelle surprise (sp?) the audience members think they're pretty spot on.

[davefoc]

There is actually some solid evidence for links between the Celtic church and the Far East.

This seemed interesting to me also.

I read through a number of web sites on Celtic Christianity, including the ones linked by Shane.

The problem, is similar to the problem that one encounters when one looks up any biblical history on the web. Everybody that writes about the issue has some kind of agenda and a lot of times the agenda is a just a desire to push their religious views without conveying any information based on actual facts.

I didn't learn much. This article from Wikipedia seemed like the most balanced thing I found.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Christianity

It seems like there's something of a consensus that Christianity existed as far back as 200 AD in the British Isles. Nobody knows exactly how it got there, but lacking something definitive isn't it reasonable to use Occam's razor and assume that it was as a result of the Roman occupation?

The links to the Eastern Othodox church looked a little tenuous to me. The Wikipedia article didn't think much of the difference between the calculation of the Easter date. It sounded like Roman Catholic church changed the technique for deriving the date the info was a little late in getting to the British Isles and when it did get there they just changed.

There seemed to be a lot made of the differences between Roman Catholicism and the Celtic Christianity on some of the religiously oriented sites for Celtic Christianity, but these differences sound like they would have a more likely cultural explanation than that the Eastern Orthodox church got there first. We don't think the Eastern Orthodox church got to South America early on and yet Catholicism there seems pretty different from main stream western Roman Catholicism.

[Soapy Sam]

Cleopatra- I most certainly encountered Colin Renfrew's work during my brief flirtation with archaeology at university, though it was the geology which took me to Santorini. I envy you your time there. My visit to Akrotiri was vaguely comical- I wanted to photograph the famous "water closet", but that meant crossing the rope barrier on the walkway and the site guard followed anyone with a camera to stop them transgressing. I started walking faster, so the poor fellow (pretty overweight) was pushed to keep up. This got to a silly stage, with me zooming around at five miles an hour and him trailing in my wake. Eventually he quit, but by that time I had realised I was out of film. Meanwhile, all the other tourists were taking advantage of my distraction to photograph all the forbidden stuff.

I felt so sorry, I gave him a bottle of coke.

It's a magical place. I went over to Nea Kameni one day.
Scary. Very scary.

We can speculate about who gave rise to what. In the end, there is only one human culture.
Personally my suspicion is that there was a lot more trade and interaction between the eastern Med and north west Europe from at least Mycenaean time onward than is generally appreciated.

Given the impenetrability of most of Europe at the time, any sea route was infinitely faster than a land route. The megalith builders in Malta, France and Britain put most of their structures where they could be seen from the sea. All exploration came from the coast.

But I don't have to tell a Greek about Thallassa

[CapelDodger]

From Shane Costello:
Randi posing as a psychic on C4 right now!
Saw it. Loved it. Great trick at the end.

[CapelDodger]

From Shane Costello:
The Celtic church seems to have been influenced by Eastern, rather than Roman Christianity
Back to the nature of Welshness.

The Saxons were converted by the Roman Church, but of course the Celtic Church predates that. The Celtic Church had no interst in converting Saxons. Imagine the conversation: "If we do not bring to them the truth of Jesus their souls will be consigned to Hell." "Your point being?" The Romans, on the other hand, saw them as another source of income and influence. The Romans also, of course, claimed supremacy in the Christian Church, breaking news to the Celtic Church I can tell you. But of course the Catholics had the gorram Saxons to wave around, and the Celts knew where that ended. So long story short, negotiations and liturgical nuancing ended in a delegation assembling in Ireland and meeting the Papal Nuncio or whatever. But the delegation hadn't yet agreed on what their answer was to be - subjection to Rome, or bite me. So before they entered the meeting-room they decided that if the Papal chappie stood to greet them when they entered they would accept Rome, otherwise not. Said Papal guy stays arrogantly seated, Celts say nothing, turn and leave.

The end result, of course, was so devastating that Ireland is still a dismally Catholic country.

Welsh Christianity is principally split between Methodism and Anglicanism, with surprisingly little Catholicism given the Irish influx. Wesley was a big hit with the native Welsh, and that was taken on by the incoming working class. As for the Irish, my feeling is that they went with class, not religion. After all, Methodism wasn't exactly Protestantism - that was represented by Anglicanism, the Christianity of the owners and the managers. The working class have chapel (capel), the middle and upper classes have Church. It's still the same, to the extent that anybody bothers. And as for the Irish - what had the Pope/ bull-god ever done for them?

[Shane Costello]

Originally posted by davefoc:
The problem, is similar to the problem that one encounters when one looks up any biblical history on the web. Everybody that writes about the issue has some kind of agenda and a lot of times the agenda is a just a desire to push their religious views without conveying any information based on actual facts.

This is true. That being said the case for Celtic Christianity (and something of Celtic culture) having eastern or North African influences is plausible. Some musicologists believe that Irish traditional music has eastern, rather than European influences. Ancient Celtic manuscripts are decorated in a fashion not dissimilar to Coptic scripts. And sea routes from Western Europe to the East Mediterranean would have facilitated exchange of ideas and culture. Again, interesting and plausible speculation rather than "strong evidence".

[Shane Costello]

Originally posted by CapelDodger:
The Saxons were converted by the Roman Church, but of course the Celtic Church predates that. The Celtic Church had no interst in converting Saxons. Imagine the conversation: "If we do not bring to them the truth of Jesus their souls will be consigned to Hell." "Your point being?" The Romans, on the other hand, saw them as another source of income and influence. The Romans also, of course, claimed supremacy in the Christian Church, breaking news to the Celtic Church I can tell you. But of course the Catholics had the gorram Saxons to wave around, and the Celts knew where that ended.

IIRC soem Irish missionaries did proletyse among the Saxons, especially in the North of England. I seem to remember in the film "Alfred the Great" that Alfred's sidekick was an Irish monk.

Welsh Christianity is principally split between Methodism and Anglicanism, with surprisingly little Catholicism given the Irish influx. Wesley was a big hit with the native Welsh, and that was taken on by the incoming working class. As for the Irish, my feeling is that they went with class, not religion. After all, Methodism wasn't exactly Protestantism - that was represented by Anglicanism, the Christianity of the owners and the managers. The working class have chapel (capel), the middle and upper classes have Church. It's still the same, to the extent that anybody bothers. And as for the Irish - what had the Pope/ bull-god ever done for them?

Well, Adrian V handed the country over to the English crown, when the Norman barons from Pembrokeshire (my ancestors included) came into the country.

Perhaps the main reason that we haven't seen a vigorous Pan-Celtic movement is religion. While Ireland remained strongly Catholic, Wales turned to evangelical Protestantism. The gulf between these traditions probably prevented any pan-celticism from emerging.

[CapelDodger]

From Cleopatra:
Welsh Dean, since I appreciate the beauty of words and of poetry more than the natural beauty, I am mostly glad that this bizarre "beauty contest" gave you the nomination for the language award
Hrmph.

One reads the verses of Odyssey and can smell the Mediterranean on Ulysse's skin...
I read a children's version very young and was absolutely captivated. I can't fully appreciate the language, of course, but the stories are brilliant. I also read Jason - the sowing the dragon's teeth thing, who writes this? I love that sense of a mysterious world where the strangest things can happen. And Sinbad, of course, and all the 1001 Nights stuff. Then I found fantasy with Narnia and Tolkien and Jack Vance (Dying Earth was consumed in one sitting), Moorcock of course. The attraction is the same - the mysterious world where adventure could be had just over the horizon. (And perhaps one of those women with the strangely abbreviated armour and remarkable physical proportions.)

I subscribe to a theory that many of these old stories were actually designed to discourage you from going over that horizon and discovering mystical secrets such as, say, where you can buy wholesale. I've read that the Arabs, for instance, persuaded the Mediterranean world that frankincense was a substance created by giant wasps - I'm talking metre-long bastards here - to make their nests. And the wasps lived in the middle of a trackless desert. Full of basilisks. You haven't heard of the basilisk? That's where nutmeg comes from; they can turn you to stone with a look, you know. Yadda yadda yadda.

I'm also quite open to the idea that they were a mnemonic device for sailors. It's so much easier to remember things when they're associated with a story rather than a list of instructions like "When you're here, do this, go there, don't do that". If your father tells you that a particular story, that you learnt as a wide-eyed child at home, referred to this place you're at, and the special meanings of the elements of the story, it sticks in the mind.

[CapelDodger]

From Shane Costello:
Well, Adrian V handed the country over to the English crown
Maybe so, but Good King John handed England back to the Pope so the legalities are going to get complicated.

The Normans who took Pembroke only took it as a base for "invading" Ireland. (Which makes it remarkable that the Welsh have never taken it back). They were invited in by one side of a dispute, but the more important point is that Normans had been involved in Ireland for centuries as mercenaries and warlords. They knew it was ripe for the plucking. There was no co-ordination, of course, and Norman happily fought Norman, but the newcomers won out to discover that what they'd won wasn't really worth much.

There's a natural tendency to think that William the Bastard/Conqueror was somehow "boss" of the Normans, but he was really leader of a loose coalition of families. Far more influential than William were the Normans of Sicily and Calabria, who not long after made a play for the Byzantine Empire. For some reason the Normans were just really good at warfare.

[The Mad Linguist]

For some reason the Normans were just really good at warfare

It's those long Scandinavian winters that do it... nothing to do but hurl axes...

[CapelDodger]

From Shane Costello:
... the case for Celtic Christianity (and something of Celtic culture) having eastern or North African influences is plausible
These similarities could simply be shared differences with Catholicism, giving us a picture of what early Christianity was like. It spread very rapidly so it was probably quite uniform to begin with, before the Celtic Churche became isolated. Then it started to differentiate.

That being said, the sailors of those days were a lot more intrepid and knowledgable than most people give them credit for. People did get around. Some Irish tales involve trips to Rome and Persia and India, so they had a sense of the wider world.

I seem to remember in the film "Alfred the Great" that Alfred's sidekick was an Irish monk.
The converting was pretty much done by then. (Not of the Danes, ofcourse.) And Hollywood ... :rolleyes: Now I'm going to find out it wasn't made in Hollywood (I don't actually remember the film). There were probably Celtic priests and momks employed by the Saxons as scribes and such, like the Chinese employed by the Mongols. I don't recall any great effort by the Celts to convert Saxons, but there are stories about the Catholics who converted the Welsh and Irish - who were aleady Christian. The winners write the history, of course.

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
These similarities could simply be shared differences with Catholicism, giving us a picture of what early Christianity was like. It spread very rapidly so it was probably quite uniform to begin with, before the Celtic Churche became isolated. Then it started to differentiate.

Hmm... you were saying something about history being written by the winners? The rapid spread / uniform origin is part of the history written by the sects of Christianity that won. It only works as long as you don't think about the Gnostics, the Arians, or half a dozen other "heresies", or indeed about the content of Paul's epistles.

[CapelDodger]

From The Mad Linguist:
It's those long Scandinavian winters that do it... nothing to do but hurl axes...
And one day someone said "This place sucks - let's hurl axe out of here".

I'm in Wales and I've been thinking "The garden could do with some serious rain". How wierd is that?

[CapelDodger]

from The Mad Linguist:Hmm... you were saying something about history being written by the winners? The rapid spread / uniform origin is part of the history written by the sects of Christianity that won. It only works as long as you don't think about the Gnostics, the Arians, or half a dozen other "heresies", or indeed about the content of Paul's epistles.
(It has just started spitting with rain. The weather is back on track even if the thread isn't)

The epistles demonstrate the split between the Jerusalem Church and the rest, but the Jerusalem Church was eliminated in 70CE. Various Gnostic sects were surely already in existence before Christianity, and some absorbed Jesus in their own way. The Nicean Council of 325CE(?) created a sort of orthodoxy - and damned the Arians as I recall. It's the rapid spread of that religion that I was thinking of.

From davefoc:
There seemed to be a lot made of the differences between Roman Catholicism and the Celtic Christianity on some of the religiously oriented sites for Celtic Christianity
There's a desire, of course, to paint the Celtic Christians as somehow more democratic and user-friendly than the Catholics. I'm sure they were just as hard on heretics as any other Christian.

[Cleopatra]

Capel Dodger

You insist that you are not a nationalist ( I believe you of course) but this thread about Cymru made you to use smilies in your posts... this came quite as a shock to me... oh well.

Now.

1. Basilisks. This attracted my curiosity because the smell of frankinscense is very familiar to a Greek-- we burn tones of it in our churches --and I opened the book of another great Brit, famous linguist but more famous food historian, Andrew Dalby to read about that.

In " Dangerous Tastes" there is a whole chapter dedicated to frankinscence but he didn't mention anything about the basilisks, pity because I have already told this story of yours to the little one I have here and she loved it...

Maybe you should have a look at this book, Capel Dodger because some of your theories about the wars on who will take control over the sources of the wholesale will be proven right. Not to mention the number of stories that you will discover in this book that are appropriate to use them to attract the interest of curious girls.

I like the theory of the codified stories of the sailors though, it gives a universal touch to the myths but I am not ready to donate Ulysses and his adventures to Humanity because I am in love with him since I first heard about him. He was Greek. Period. Tell me. Jews have been wondering during all of their historical lives but they didn't have a similar hero, why? No. Ulysses is ours. He is mine, to be exact.

Regarding the relationships between the Eastern Ortodox Church and the Celtic Church.

If you read the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia you will be suspicious that something existed indeed, otherwise I cannot explain the eagerness of the author of the article to persuade the reader that such a relationship did not exist...but of course you should take what I say about the Catholics with a speck of salt ( did I say this right? correct me if I am wrong) because my disgust for the so-called religion of the Pope is well-known and openly demonstrated in this forum.

The whole myth must have been created with the exile of St Athanasius in Trier after the Ecumenical Synod in Nicaea and the preference for the monastic life that the Celtic Church has demonsrated, according to the article Shane has provided :

An historian of Celtic Christianity has written that ‘the most characteristic feature of the Celtic Church was its preference for the monastic and eremitic life,’ and that ‘the history of the Celtic Church is largely a history of monks and monasteries’ (G.H. Doble, Lives of the Welsh Saints, Cardiff: 1971), p. 45).

Si non e vero e ben trovatto... if it's not true then it's nicely invented but I have reasons to believe that this trend that could have been in vogue in the early period of the Celtic Church didn't survive for long.

History shows us that Vatican is not kidding with its dependants...

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by Cleopatra
Ulysses is ours. He is mine, to be exact.

Give it up Cleopatra, he only has eyes for Penelope, you know that.... ;)

[Cleopatra]

LOL

I can be many things but a "Penelope" I am afraid... *sigh*

But of all the witches he has met I am the best cook, so I think that I still have hopes... Greek men appreciate a lot a good cook. :)

[CapelDodger]

Cleopatra: That's a pinch of salt. Sorry about the basilisks, but up to and including the giant wasps and desert it's true enough (true enough means I like the sound of it). The basilisk is a genuine myth (?) and can petrify you with a glance.

Mad Linguist : I'm reading "Western Languages 100-1500", and it seems to me there's a lot of "if" and "but" about the subject. Very light on the definitive statments. Which is fair enough, of course, if that's all the evidence tells you. It must be a trial to keep it all clear in your head during exams.

[Cleopatra]

But a basilisk is a reptile,not a plant, I breed reptiles I would have known about it if it existed...

edited to add: Don't torture yourself with linguistics, this science is more obscure than Prehistoric Archaeology... if this is ever possible... :p

[CapelDodger]

From The Mad Linguist:
There was a synod at Whitby in Yorkshire where Oswy the King of Northumbria summoned both representatives of both churches to present their cases, so that he could choose which version of Christianity he would follow. He chose Rome, largely for political reasons
This has always sounded like a set-up to me. And quite possibly a wild misrepresentation. On the one hand you have the religion of his enemies which, were he to take it up, would limit his options in the future. On the other, he had a religion which could offer him powerful friends on the Continent and a free hand against the remaining Celts. The Celts probably turned up prepared for a debate about dogma, and the Catholics turned up with a bag of gold.

One question will, I suppose, never be answered : did the Cetic delegation still have their noses and ears when they got back?

[davefoc]

Cleopatra said:
Si non e vero e ben trovatto

I liked this expression, but I wondered about the translation since the French word trouver means to find. So I tried looking it up in on-line latin dictionaries and couldn't find the word trovatto. I looked for words that meant to find and to invent and it didn't seem to be one of those.

So then I wondered if it was Italian (I'm not familiar enough with Italian to even recognize it for sure) but no luck there either.

Then I plugged the whole expression into yahoo. Lots of hits, one spanish site called it broken italian. One english site said that it meant, "if it's not true, it's nicely crafted/told".

It seems that this expression is widely used in the rest of the world but not in America, at least not the part that I'm in.

trovare is italian word for find which was closest I found to trovatto.

[CapelDodger]

I've just been chtting to a friend about the Synod of Whitby and he sourced it to the Venerable Bede. Whose works I don't actually have (I will rectify that), but I got this off the internet:

Bishop Colman spoke for the Scots (i.e. Irish) and said:] The Easter which I keep I received from my elders, who sent me hither as bishop; all our forefathers, men beloved of God, are known to have kept it after the same manner; and that this may not seem to any contemptible or worthy to be rejected, it is the same which St. John the Evangelist, the disciple beloved of our Lord, with all the churches he presided, is recorded to have observed." . . .

Let's not assume that these were the actual words. The online Catholic Enyclopaedia has a high opinion of Bede, so we can assume he was a liar. But there's nothing here that we wouldn't expect. The only manipulation that seems worthwhile is the insertion of reference to John. As far as I know there is no actual tradition of a Church headed by "John the Evangelist". James the brother of Jeebus, yes. John the Baptist and the Mandeans, yes. If I'm wrong I'd like to know, because this is a subject that interests me.

Then Wilfrid was ordered by the king to speak for the Roman practice: " The Easter which we observe we saw, celebrated by all at Rome, where the blessed apostles, Peter, and Paul, lived, taught, suffered, and were buried - we saw the same done in Italy and in France, when we I traveled through those countries for pilgrimage and prayer. found that Easter was celebrated at one and the same time in Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, and all the world, wherever the Church of Christ is spread abroad, through the various nations and tongues ; except only among these and their accomplices in obstinacy, I mean the Picts and the Britons, who foolishly, in these two remote islands of the world, and only in part even of them, oppose all the rest of the universe. . . .

Which is, of course, an outright lie. Now Bede could be lying about these words, but he was writing within decades of the event

I find the juxtaposition of this confrontation and discussions on this kind of forum intriguing.

The Celtic delegates may have been left sputtering by this bare-faced lying, but how could they pin the lie? Where are your links? What are your references? The audience is a thug whose only interest in this whole matter is his own advantage. (There aren't even any makes-you-think-twice issues like slicing your foreskin off.) Your opponent is a professional lobbyist who couldn't care less about religion, accompanied by a chorus of blissed-out geeks who couldn't caremore. There are paralells. It's hard to put into words, but when I've sobered up I might try.

Entirely separately, I've just heard that a guy I know has been playing in a village festival in France in honour of one Owain Llawgoch (Owen Redhand). This chap was a great-grandson of Llewellyn the Great (a prince of North Wales) and nephew of Llewellyn the Last (what a name!) and was assassinated in France in 1361 by agents of Edward III. He was a mercenary by one description, a vassal and loyal supporter of the French King by another, but was considered by the English to be a threat. Given the long association between France and Scotland, and the trouble and expense that has caused the English, they were probably right. Supporting evidence is provided by the annual festival that is held in his honour in the French village that was his main demesne. This guy must have been extremely charismatic and a damn good politician.

[The Mad Linguist]

I agree, but disagree with the characterisation of Oswy as a thug. The Anglo-Saxons weren't notably uncivilised to start with, and by the time the Sinod of Whitby came around, they were pretty highly cultured. Better to say "the audience is a POLITICIAN whose only interest in this whole matter is his own advantage."

Well that, and not getting into a war with the Catholic Saxon kingdoms to the south...

By that time enough of England was Catholic that Oswy wouldn't have dared go the other way. It was a fait accompli from the start for my money.

[CapelDodger]

The Mad Linguist:
Politician / Thug - a distinction without a difference in those days. No thug can prosper without his lieutenants, which makes him a politician. But thuggery is still his business. In the small kingdoms we're concerned with here there was little to be done in the way of ruling other than thuggery.

[Soapy Sam]

Capeldodger- You said

"The Saxons were converted by the Roman Church, but of course the Celtic Church predates that. "

Now does the "that" at the end refer to
1.the Saxon conversion, or
2.the Roman Church?

I assume you mean 1. Or are you saying Moluag, Columba et al are older than I think they are?

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by CapelDodger

I find the juxtaposition of this confrontation and discussions on this kind of forum intriguing.

The Celtic delegates may have been left sputtering by this bare-faced lying, but how could they pin the lie? Where are your links? What are your references? The audience is a thug whose only interest in this whole matter is his own advantage. (There aren't even any makes-you-think-twice issues like slicing your foreskin off.) Your opponent is a professional lobbyist who couldn't care less about religion, accompanied by a chorus of blissed-out geeks who couldn't caremore. There are paralells. It's hard to put into words, but when I've sobered up I might try.



I have been reading this paragraph for 20 minutes and finally got it! Damn you Capel Dodger I have a headache now!! Arggggg

How could you possibly think of something like that?:eek:

Think twice before attempting to word the parallel... you see, now that I finally realized where are you getting at, I can say that everybody can come up with a parallel. Everybody and this weakens a bit your concept...

edited to add:

davefoc: Sorry I didn't reply earlier but I have been trying to deciphre this Cymric Curse. !@#$%^

The phrase is Italian and trovato is with one t...

If I am not mistaken it's attributed to an anonymous commentator of Dante that was asked once to check another copy of " Inferno" and he exclamated that even if it wasn't real it was very well invented.

Others connect this phrase with the commentators of the Holly Gospels. I don't know.

[davefoc]

Just a small request by someone that is trying to follow this:

Could people add rough dates for the events they are talking about? Thanks.

Cleopatra, thanks for the info. I found hits on the expression with trovatto and trovato on the internet. I was surprised how many times it showed up, especially since both trovato and trovatto didn't show up in the Italian Dictionary that I looked at but perhaps it didn't have different tenses for the verbs.

[Cleopatra]

Davefoc, they are talking about the Synod of Witby that took place in Yorkshire as early as the 658 AD and they try to reproduce the dialogues that took place between the Celtic delegates, the representatives of the Roman Church and King Oswy.... The problem started because the Queen was fasting when the King was celebrating Easter ;)

Capel Dodger saw some similarities between the debate that took place almost 1300 years earlier and some debates that take place here :) He promised to give it a try to point them out for us but of course he will refuse that he made such a promise...of course his attitude in this matter will judge if I am going to cooperate with him in the eve of the Final Battle between Felix and Humanity, I do not expect much though, I do not trust men.

If I got it well it was this reference in the script of Bede ( one of the two sources we have about the Synod) when the King asked Bishop Colman if he could provide him with any evidence that Columba hold the key of Heavens the same way St. Peter holds it ( according to Wilfrid-- the "speaker" of the representatives of the Roman Church)

Poor Bishop Colman didn't have Internet to provide the King with a link -- the poor man couldn't lie obviously-- and the Celts were thrown to the pit with the Papal mud.

[Brian the Snail]

Originally posted by davefoc
Cleopatra, thanks for the info. I found hits on the expression with trovatto and trovato on the internet. I was surprised how many times it showed up, especially since both trovato and trovatto didn't show up in the Italian Dictionary that I looked at but perhaps it didn't have different tenses for the verbs.

Sorry, this wasn't directed at me, but just to point out that trovare is the Italian infinitive form of the verb meaning to find (but according to my dictionary, it can also mean to think). Trovato is the past participle of this verb, so in English it would roughly correspond to found or thought. Dictionaries usually just list the infinitive forms of verbs, and not all of the tenses (unless it's irregular, which this one isn't).

My Italian is still a bit crappy, but Cleopatra's quote does sound very much like broken Italian, or some old form or dialect of Italian. In modern Italian I think it would be something like "Se non e vero e ben trovato." But if it does come from Dante's time, then it could well be an antiquated form of Italian.

Edited to add: regarding the last paragraph, just to repeat that my Italian is still quite poor, so you should take what I say with a large pinch of salt. Just offering my thoughts, that's all.

Nice discussion, by the way.

[CapelDodger]

From The Mad Linguist:
I agree, but disagree with the characterisation of Oswy as a thug.
I take your point. I think my encounter with the Catholic Encyclopaedia led me to use intemperate language. Oswy was looking out for his own interests, and why not. The events at Whitby seem odd - there was only one reasonable outcome - but I wonder if Oswy saw the encounter as an opportunity to learn about the two factions and observe their interactions? After all, he must have been reasonably smart to get where he did. Who'll have heard of me in 3300CE?

I'm going to take a look at the Celtic Church and see where John the Evangelist fits in.

[CapelDodger]

Soapy Sam:
I was referring, imprecisely, to the Celtic Church predating the Saxon conversion.

Cleopatra:
Damn you Capel Dodger I have a headache now!!
Sorry about that. I was quietly raging after reading some stuff on the Catholic Encyclopaedia and not being very coherent.

The lie that "Everybody does it our way" could have been exposed by taking Oswy to Byzantium, a trip that would have taken a year or more I should think. Now we have the internet and printed media to support or refute claims. But even then a lie can't always be nailed. You can understand the frustration of the Celtic delegation (assuming this event ever took place, which I think is likely), especially if they were expecting a completely different kind of event and were gradually realising what was going on.

... I do not trust men
I agree - all men are bastards. But you can trust me because you terrify me.

[The Mad Linguist]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
(assuming this event ever took place, which I think is likely)

Our records are not nearly as bad for the seventh century as they are for the fifth and sixth, as far as I recall.

[Cleopatra]

So, Mad Linguist do you think that there is some truth in the incident.

Maybe my question is silly because as far as I know Bede's Ecclesistical History and Eddius Steppanus's Life of Wilfrid are considered trustworthy sources.

[The Mad Linguist]

I think that there is a certain amount of evidence to suppose that the Synod of Whitby took place roughly as reported, and no particular evidence to suggest that it didn't.

[Cleopatra]

Capel Dodger

I guess that I do not have to say that I have spent the day thinking about this crazy Synod and reading as much as I could.
This is my story-- I hope you won't ask me for links to support it...

If Saint Columba was aware of the tradition of the Desert Fathers, then there is not doubt that the Celtic Church was closer to the Orthodox Church than to the Vatican.

You see, our tradition is not about Easter and haircuts but about monasticism. Prayer and isolation and abstain from the cosmic/political power; this is who we are and that's why Vatican pisses us off that much. Haunted by our demons, we try to sketch a life with a purpose away from the things that have an expiration date.

So, if the Celtic Church was within this spirit (you are Welsh, so, you tell me) then yes, we can talk about a relationship.

The Orthodox Easter should always fall after the Jewish Passover. Why? But because in that way we follow the Biblical tradition :) Jesus who was a Jew entered Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, so, his adventures must take place after it.

The mania of the Orthodox Christians to keep the canon and the tradition of the Apostoles was the big issue between them and the Pope. So, the conflict might seem that it's about Easter but it's about the tradition and the political color that the Pope wished to add to his authority.

To return to the Synod in Whitby. You are right about something, history is written by the winners and the dialogue that took place back them reminded me of something that I was missing but I finally remembered. It's a typical dialogue you encounter in texts since antiquity. I remind you of the dialogue between Zeus and Prometheus bounded in Aescylus' " Prometheus Bounded".

Zeus was lying and Prometheus couldn't prove it but he wasn't interested anyway because he knew that Zeus was the winner.

So, the dialogue Bedes saves for us is very much in context of a long literary tradition.I can bring more examples of this literary tradition if you wish.

To make a long story short. I do not believe that the Pope delegates lied, I am sorry :) It's absurd, if you think about it.

I am sure that they didn't claim that " they celebrate easter the way everybody does". Even if the Celts couldn't refute the argument the King would have asked for a proof.

This is a post-hoc presentation of the facts that intented to show the wisdom of the Pope's delegates and their spiritual superiority over the other "inferior" dogmas.


Now regarding this:
you can trust me because you terrify me. :"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was "Ambiguous"...


:c1:

[CapelDodger]

I'm not really questioning the Synod, but I'm not entirely convinced it was exactly as described. I agree the Dark Ages are not as dark as many think, but our sources from this time had to have their own sources. Only attendees would have been certain. The story of the Synod would have been spread from Whitby via the Catholic Church, and these people knew about the "party line" even back then.

"Oswy's Choice" would have been presented as the god leading Oswy to the truth of the one Church. I suspect that the reference to John was inserted as something that could be used to demonstrate the sad ignorance of the benighted Celts - well-meaning, no doubt, but misguided.

I went looking into the Celtic Church and the Evangelist, and couldn't come up with any other reference to the Celts tracing the Church back to John. I did come across something by the Apostolic Episcopal Church that made me giggle :
It practices conservative theology and doctrine but possesses and displays compassion and understanding
(my emphasis)
I love that they felt the need to put the second bit in.

[CapelDodger]

Hi Cleopatra:
You see, our tradition is not about Easter and haircuts but about monasticism. Prayer and isolation and abstain from the cosmic/political power; this is who we are and that's why Vatican pisses us off that much. Haunted by our demons, we try to sketch a life with a purpose away from the things that have an expiration date.
Doesn't bode well for the Olympics, does it? 2004 is sort of a deadline.

I think monasticism is a natural way for humans to express their spiruality. Just as pyramids being built in different places doesn't mean a link between them - it's a natural shape for building high structures - shared monasticism doesn't mean a link. You see it in Judaism and Hinduism - perhaps not identically, but prehaps representing the same human trait.

It could also mean that as the Roman Church emerged it developed in a way that side-lined the exisiting monasticism. Catholic Christianity is very concerned with society, and the control of that society. You can only get to Paradise via the Church, for instance, however good a person you are. This doesn't really have much use for monasticism.

The arguments over Easter are really about precedence. If other Churches do significant things differently from the Catholics, where does that leave the leading role of the Catholic Church? Catholicism treats the Church as a divine institution, and by that they mean the Church the Pope runs, not just Christianity in general. A divine institution can not be less than 100% correct.

Zeus was lying and Prometheus couldn't prove it but he wasn't interested anyway because he knew that Zeus was the winner.
Ancient cynicism. I guess humans developed that a long time ago. It reminds me of a story I'll look up tomorrow.

I don't think Oswy would have asked for evidence, by the way. What could the evidence be, after all? If it was a document, could he read Church Latin or Greek? Unlikely, so he'd have to have it read by a scribe who would be a Christian of one sort of the other. I doubt if he cared which religion was "right". I also doubt if the Catholic delegate cared if he was lying or not. He just wanted to win the argument.

Jesus who was a Jew entered Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, so, his adventures must take place after it.
Given the mention of the people carrying palm fronds during his entry, might it not have been Tabernacles? We don't know that the Jerusalem Church founded by his immediate followers celebrated his death, or even that they thought he had been resurrected in the flesh. We don't even know if Paul thought that he was - he uses the same word to describe Jesus's appearances to him (which he said was in visions) and his appearances to Peter and the others.

Let's not get too on-thread here. It's been Celtic this and Irish that - much too close to home.

Please don't do that cat thing. I remain constantly aware that you have access to the Curse of the Cat, although I'd be more convinced you knew how to use it if you applied it to a prominent person so we could see the results. (A thought occurs to me - did you try it on Tony Blair and forget to tell anyone?) You'll notice that I've hardly mentioned cats at all on this thread even though the paw-prints of their manipulations run clear as day through this Synod of Whitby affair. And the Phoenician thing. Their secrets are safe with me. In fact maybe I should do the cynical thing and switch sides now.

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by JAR

My favorite place that I've been to is Anza Borrego in southern California. It's a deserty area with palm trees and other green vegetation at occasional places where there are streams and other water sources.



JAR

As I was reviewing the thread I saw that post that I must have missed-- the monitor of the laptop I was using during the previous couple of weeks gave me a really hard time-- now that I am back home and I am using my huge monitor I am catching up the threads...

I liked California very much although I wasn't exactly fascinated by the people of California, bleached smiles and California fitness-- I am maniac with exercise but not like that... and drugs, oh the drugs...everybody had THAT smile on their face and they did this particular tick with their nose...

California is a nice place but it's not the whole world.

I hope that now that you are in college you will spend your summers travelling around the world. Money is not the issue because you can work in the places you visit-- you speak an international language anyway and there are plenty of places to spend the night in safety. Also, you don't need to have company--travelling alone to learn new things is more convenient.

Do it, don't waste your time :)

The Welsh League :

I read the myth of the faithful dog Gelert (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/about/myth-gelert.shtml) and it really broke my heart...

And this (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/snapdragon/yesflash/intro.htm) is for the members of the League that don't speak Welsh but they want to learn some with the help of the Red Dragon. It's for children that's why I find it very appropriate to post it here.

[CapelDodger]

Hi Cleopatra:
The story of Gelert is a very popular one in Wales, every child hears it and, hopefully, learns from it.

Zeus was lying and Prometheus couldn't prove it but he wasn't interested anyway because he knew that Zeus was the winner.
This is from Story of My Life by Moshe Dayan, quoted in The Siege by Conor Cruise O'Brien. Dayan and Moshe Sharrett were engaged in negotiations with Abdullah of Jordan in1949.

Towards Moshe Sharrett [the King] was well-disposed - at first. But at one of our meetings ... Sharrett corrected the king when he mentioned in passing that China had not been a member of the League of Nations. A king never errs and Abdullah stood by his statement. Sharrett, like a demonstratively patient kindergarten teacher with a backward child, kept saying, "But Your Majesty you are wrong, China did belong to the League". That was the end of that meeting... I asked Sharrett what the devil it mattered what the king thought about China and the League. Sharrett turned on me with some heat: "But China was a member of the League of Nations."
You can sort of sympathise with the guy.

This seems to represent a cultural trait that increases as you travel east from Europe. Status derives not from avoiding problems, or from solving problems, but from being able to deny the problem exists and have everyone around you nod and commend your wisdom. Accounts by British Imperial diplomats in, say, Kabul report the same of thing. "Our country is the richest in the world; our commonest peasant is dressed in silk and wears golden rings," says the king. You've just come through Kabul picking your way around piles of nameless refuse which people are living on, trying to avoid getting caught under a collapsing building, and, like everybody else in the room, you nod and praise the king's generosity and fatherly attitude to his people. What is gained by this? Judging by the way the world's gone, not a lot.

It didn't help King Abdullah much, for a start.

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
Hi Cleopatra:
The story of Gelert is a very popular one in Wales, every child hears it and, hopefully, learns from it.

None ever learned just by hearing to a story.

This seems to represent a cultural trait that increases as you travel east from Europe. Status derives not from avoiding problems, or from solving problems, but from being able to deny the problem exists and have everyone around you nod and commend your wisdom.

IF this is what Western people believe about the East, no wonder they have done so little to tame Her so far. Crusading and stealing from her is one thing, understanding and taming her, another.

Having this mentality people of the West will stay what they are; they might accomplish many things in the technological field but for us these are just more sophisticated methods to perform cannibalism.

We got over cannibalism 2000 years ago, you discovered it "yesterday" and you are performing it with great passion and pleasure since.

You have a long way ahead of you in order to built civilizations based on accumulated social experience and not on "methods" ( aka technology).

[CapelDodger]

From Cleopatra:
IF this is what Western people believe about the East, no wonder they have done so little to tame Her so far. Crusading and stealing from her is one thing, understanding and taming her, another.
I would cite the Dayan story as evidence. I'm being geographically imprecise, I know, and I could point to Western European situations that were much the same - the times of Philip the Good of Burgundy, say, 1400-1500CE when sycophancy was triumphant. It's not the only trait that is found in the East, obviously, but it is one. And it's not a positive human trait in the modern world.

To say that Western Europeans have not learnt from their encounters with the East is simply wrong. The experience is engraved in the philosophical and artistic culture. Also in the scientific and mathematical culture, although that mostly remains unrecognised (Newton - world's most famous plagiarist? Discuss.)

(If you get a chance, read What Went Wrong? - the clash between Islam and modernity in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis. I'd be interested in your opinion, but I think it's very incisive.)

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
From Cleopatra:

To say that Western Europeans have not learnt from their encounters with the East is simply wrong. The experience is engraved in the philosophical and artistic culture. Also in the scientific and mathematical culture, although that mostly remains unrecognised (Newton - world's most famous plagiarist? Discuss.)


Well, I am afraid that West learned very few things, it took the things that it could use on a practical level and it ignored the human level in which the East has to offer most. Of course this is the result of the catastrophic Papism. In another thread, a poster was defending the contribution of the Catholic Church in the progress of science in the western world. The tomatos of Santorini saved me from involing myself into one more debate in this forum...

Have a look at a very strange but interesting book : Christopher Small, Music,Society,Education.

The author by attempting to answer to the question why we consider Beethoven more important a composer than the anonymous Middle Eastern musician discusses the whole matter thoroughly.He analyzes the way West used the knowledge of the East. Of course he uses Music as a starting point , the book is not about music.

Great book especially if you consider Music the ultimate, or better, the only way to express everything, from ideas to feelings, especially those that words fail to describe. In the beginning was the note :)

I will have a look at the book you mention, thanks.

About Christopher Small (http://www.furious.com/perfect/chrissmall.html)

[JAR]

Speaking of interesting ancestries, I have a friend and I found out yesterday that he's half Turkish.

He looked different than your average white guy and had a shade of dark brown extremely curly hair that I had never seen before. I just figured he was Jewish or something, then the subject of how he had changed his name came up and I asked if his former middle name was Finnish(because it had an umlaut and I had some vague memory that Finnish used umlauts) and he said, "No, it's Turkish."

[Cleopatra]

This obsession of yours with skin colors, JAR, never seizes to surprise me :)

If you could see me now, after the sunbathing of the summer I am black. Black. I belong to the black race :) I have black hair and black eyes. Black like the devil :)

People who see me and hear that my mom is Israeli they say that I must have taken the colors of my mother. Well, my Israeli mother is blonde with green ( green not hazel) eyes and she has a skin, pale like the milk, she also has a French nose. My grandma was born in the Nederlands and her ancestors were Dutch. So, you can't judge by the appearance.

If I learn to talk Middle English I will be a black Israeli-Greek that will talk like a heroine of Tolkeen :p I love the idea !! The ultimate mockery of the races :)

Have you thought of becoming a physical anthropologist BTW?

Today I read something about races that you might find interesting but I will post it to the other thread you have started about racism.

[JAR]

Originally posted by Sundog
[snip]
What traits do the Welsh share as a people?[snip]

In the Penguin Classics edition of "The Journey Through Wales/The Description of Wales" by Gerald of Wales(1145 AD-1223 AD) translated by Lewis Thorpe, it says in Chapter 15 of "Description of Wales" on page 245:
The Britons[i.e. The Brythons], on the contrary, transplanted from the hot and arid regions of the Trojan plain, keep their dark colouring, which reminds one of the earth itself, their natural warmth of personality and their hot temper, all of which gives them confidence in themselves.

In "Agricola"(written in 98 AD) by Tacitus and translated from Latin by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, it says in Chapter 11 concerning the Brythons:
Their physical characteristics are various, and from these conclusions may be drawn. The red hair and large limbs of the inhabitants of Caledonland[i.e. Scotland north of the Firth of Forth and Firth of Clyde] point clearly to a German origin. The dark complexion of the Silurs[i.e. a people who lived partly in England and partly in Wales], their usually curly hair, and the fact that Spain is the opposite shore to them, are an evidence that Iberians of a former date crossed over and occupied these parts. Those who are nearest to the Gauls are also like them, either from the permanent influence of original descent, or, because in countries which run out so far to meet each other, climate has produced similar physical qualities. But a general survey inclines me to believe that the Gauls established themselves in an island so near to them. Their religious belief may be traced in the strongly-marked British superstition. The language differs but little; there is the same boldness in challenging danger, and, when it is near, the same timidity in shrinking from it.

In Book 4.5.2 of the Loeb version of "Geography"(written originally in Greek) by Strabo(64-63 BC-25 AD) it says about Britain:
It bears grain, cattle, gold, silver, and iron. These things, accordingly, are exported from the island, as also hides, and slaves, and dogs that are by nature suited to the purposes of the chase; the Celts, however, use both these and the native dogs for the purposes of war too. The men of Britain are taller than the Celts, and not so yellow-haired, although their bodies are of looser build. The following is an indication of their size: I myself, in Rome, saw mere lads towering as much as half a foot above the tallest people in the city, although they were bowlegged and presented no fair lines anywhere else in their figure. Their habits are in part like those of the Celts, but in part more simple and barbaric…..

Going off the subject, in the Penguin Classics edition of "The History and Topography of Ireland" by Gerald of Wales(who was quoted above) and translated by John J. O' Meara, it says concerning Ireland in Chapter 54 of the second part:
Shortly before the coming of the English into the island[i.e. Ireland] a cow from a man's intercourse with her - a particular vice of that people - gave birth to a man-calf in the mountains around Glendalough.

[JAR]

Originally posted by Cleopatra
[snip]If you could see me now, after the sunbathing of the summer I am black. Black. I belong to the black race :) I have black hair and black eyes. Black like the devil :)
[snip]
I envy your beautiful dark skin.

There's a myth I've heard that white people find dark skin unattractive. That may be true of some white people but not most of us. To see what I mean, just think of all those white women out there who are sunbathing. And sunbathing isn't a new concept. Both of my grandmothers sunbathed back when they were growing up in the 1930s and '40s and my mother said that when she was growing up, a tan was considered a sign of good health. When people started getting skin cancer, that proved to be a myth also.

But the fact still remains. Light-skinned people generally don't like being light-skinned and light-skin is considered undesirable for people trying to find a mate. I think that in the U.S., light-skinned people are going to gradually gravitate from places in the southern U.S., to places in the northern U.S., because they won't be able to compete in the mating process with the darker skinned Hispanics. So they'll move to places in the north where there is a larger concentration of white people to find a desirable white mate from.

[Cleopatra]

1. Thanks for the bibliographical references regarding Wales. This winter will be busy in reading.

2. Although I do not underestimate the role of attraction and appearance -- the older I grow the less I underestimate it-- reasonable people do not choose mates judging by their skin color.

Maybe I have mentioned this before but although I have been in very close relationships with "the enemy" ( Arabs) I would never get married to a muslim Arab and not because of his color but because of our cultural differences that exist. For the same reason I'd never get married to an African, not because of his color but however attractive or "sexy" the differences are, when it comes to the daily life differences become very tiring, I know this by first hand.

Now, as long as the Hispanics in the American South stay in the same social position, they are not a threat for the light-skin people. Mating depends on many things except of the skin color and when I am talking about mating I am talking about the creation of a family and not for occasional relationships.

You might want to start a new thread about this.

[CapelDodger]

If you look at portraits and photos of the great Victorian beauties you'll find they're pale and, in modern terms, fat. Mind you in modern terms Marilyn Monroe is regarded as overweight. It seems that ideas of beauty can be affected by what is presented as beauty. White skin was high-status, since it meant you didn't work in the fields. Tanned skin became the thing when it showed you didn't have to work in a factory. Maybe.

[Cleopatra]

Now that I am experimenting with my new toy ( my cable connection) I thought to listen to Welsh with the help of BBC

What so ever,if you believe in the BBC Wales, it seems that the people of Wales do nothing but talking about athletics and bets.

I confess that I have difficulty in understanding when they are talking about Rugby, when about horses and when about the beers that they will drink ( when she hears to the word "beer" she gets chills out of horror.... beers...http://www.handykult.de/plaudersmilies.de/smhair2.gifmon dieu!! ) ... :rolleyes:

Is this the land of the romantic poets and singers?????

:rolleyes:

[CapelDodger]

Cleopatra:

Sport and drink. Men - who can explain them.

A good day yesterday - Wales won and England lost. There's a fairly common Welsh T-short slogan : "I only support two teams - Wales and whoever's playing England".

I bought a book yesterday (there's a shock) called "Old English History for Children", written in the 1860's. It has no mention of the Synod of Whitby, funnily enough, but has a lot to say about Augustine. The author states that a letter from Pope Gregory to Augustine says that "... he was not bound to do in everything exactly as was done at Rome ..." and that he should choose customs best suited to the people and place. It seems Augustine was acting beyond his instructions in causing a fuss over Easter; I wonder why? Was he just arrogant, or perhaps the Celts irritated him (a far-fetched idea)? We shall probably never know.

If you're out there, Mad Linguist : there's a place just over the English border called Symond's Yat. Now I'm pretty sure that "Yat" isn't Welsh. Any idea what it derives from? I'm thinking perhaps the same root as "gate"? It look Scandinavian to me, but it's surely too far inland.

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
Men - who can explain them.

Certainly not me Capel Dodger for I follow my grandma's advice never to get involved in useless tasks like trying to understand men. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, men exist in order to be exploited and not to be understood...

A good day yesterday - Wales won and England lost. There's a fairly common Welsh T-short slogan : "I only support two teams - Wales and whoever's playing England"

That explains the whole excitement at the radio station then!

It seems Augustine was acting beyond his instructions in causing a fuss over Easter; I wonder why? Was he just arrogant, or perhaps the Celts irritated him (a far-fetched idea)? We shall probably never know.

As I posted above, I continue to believe that the whole issue about Easter was about tradition. Eastern Christians believe in tradition, Western Christians believe in tradition only when it's convenient or if they can manipulate others by using it.

Where did you find the book you mention, is it an old one or a re-print? Make my day...

Also, I tried to find -- with the help of Internet-- a book about the Welsh cuisine because I collect such things, does such a book exist?

[CapelDodger]

Hi Cleopatra:
Also, I tried to find -- with the help of Internet-- a book about the Welsh cuisine because I collect such things, does such a book exist?
You'd be lucky to find a pamphlet. I'll see what I can find.

There are plenty of good Welsh cheeses, including a few ewe's milk cheeses. The best cheese I've ever tasted is Merlin smoked goat's milk cheese. Damned expensive, and I'm not sure they still make it. Must check.
Where did you find the book you mention, is it an old one or a re-print?
It's an old one, a "pocket-sized" cloth-bound book in a series called the Everyman's Library from the 20's and 30's (part of the great self-improvement movement that was so important in British socialism). I have dozens of them. I found it at a weekly boot-sale / flea-market we have weekly round here. That, an Everyman's Life of Robert Browning , a novel in the Nelson Library (a similar series) and Vol 1 of a biography of J S Bach by Dr Albert Schweitzer (well, why not?), all for a pound. Love that market.

Something you'd like is The Museum of Welsh Life in St Fagan's, which is just outside Cardiff. It's based on a manor-house and its grounds have been filled with buildings brought from all over Wales. Included is a 19th CE bakery where they make old-style breads (and bara brith) and sell it at silly prices. It's a must-see if you come to Cardiff. Allow a lot of time and bring a picnic. You can also get a good meal at the pub over the road.

[Dragon]

Only just noticed this thread - should pay more attention to the whole forum.

Not a lot to add as CapelDodger and others have been so eloquent.

Just two things, in fact -
Listen to a Welsh male voice choir singing "Myfanwy" - if it doesn't bring a tear to your eye then you have a heart of stone.

If you come to Wales go to The Big Pit at Blaenavon (which is now a World Heritage Centre because of its role in the Industrial Revolution) - go underground with an ex-miner as your guide. Unforgettable.

[Cleopatra]

The Welsh League :

Allow me to bring to your attention, gentlemen, that the sample of Welsh folk poetry --composed by Welsh Dean and inspired by a sunny country-- that is nominated for the Language Award hasn't been voted so far...

Let me guess, Welsh suck in lobbying so the results of the Synod of Whitby must not surpise us... it must be part of welshness or it's just that all of you are so anti-nationalists??

[CapelDodger]

From Cleopatra:
Allow me to bring to your attention, gentlemen, that the sample of Welsh folk poetry --composed by Welsh Dean and inspired by a sunny country-- that is nominated for the Language Award hasn't been voted so far...
Where's this going on?

from y Ddraig:
If you come to Wales go to The Big Pit at Blaenavon (which is now a World Heritage Centre because of its role in the Industrial Revolution) - go underground with an ex-miner as your guide. Unforgettable.
Absolutely. You can also visit the gold-mines where the gold for royal wedding-rings is mined.

[Dragon]

CapelDodger -

:D I nearly called myself "Y Ddraig" or "Y Ddraig Goch" - but decided against it as I don't speak Welsh (I thought "Siarad Cymraeg?" - "Na" would get a bit tedious).

Does your name have anything to do with avoiding chapel on Sundays?

[CapelDodger]

Dragon:
"Chapel-Dodger" is a term from my school-days and refers to one who is excused morning prayer and church-related activities (note: we Brits don't have separation of Church and State, in fact exactly the opposite when you consider the monarch's roles) by virtue of being of a non-Xian faith or a free-thinker with a note from his parents. I declared my atheism, after a deal of thought and giggling, at age 10 and have never regretted it.

By the way, "free-thinker" is not commonly used as a compliment in a Methodist-dominated society. Which only confirmed my opinion as far as I was concerned.

Sadly, I do not speak Welsh either, apart from the usual odds-and-ends like "Twll-dyn bob Sais" which is an earthy reference to the English (Saxons/Sais/Sassenach). That's the sort of thing you pick up in school - I personally have nothing against the English or anyone else, of course.

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by CapelDodger
I declared my atheism, after a deal of thought and giggling, at age 10 and have never regretted it.


Let's hope that Lord Kenneth doesn't read that so as he gives his mom a hard time for not being as tolerant as yours :)

How YDraig is pronounced? As I can read it?

How you call the Red Dragon in Welsh?

[Dragon]

Originally posted by Cleopatra


Let's hope that Lord Kenneth doesn't read that so as he gives his mom a hard time for not being as tolerant as yours :)

How YDraig is pronounced? As I can read it?

How you call the Red Dragon in Welsh?

Cleo - I'll do the best I can as a non Welsh speaking Welshman - pay attention as this can get complicated. :)

"Y Ddraig" is pronounced Uh TH-raig
- with the "th" as in the English "the", not as in "think" and the "ai" like the "i" in "bike".

Y Ddraig Goch is The Red Dragon. "Goch" is pronounced with a long "o" and the "ch" as the Scottish "loch"

Welsh is actually pretty phonetic - the thing to know is that the alphabet is different to English. Some letters are made up of two characters like the "dd" in Ddraig.

This link (http://www.madog.org/dysgwyr/gramadeg/gramadeg1.html) shows the full alphabet. If you want to know more then Google for Welsh + pronunciation or Welsh + alphabet.
Another puzzling feature of Welsh is the way the beginnings of words are mutated depending on what comes before (because its sounds more poetic).

My favourite example - "caru" (pron ca-ri") is Welsh for love.

"loved one" would be "an carad" - but this is mutated to "Angharad" - you have to say it properly with a soft "g".

Well that's about my limit - any use?

[Cleopatra]

Originally posted by Dragon
Well that's about my limit - any use?

More than you can imagine :)

Thank you very much. Good luck in Milan tomorrow!!

[Dragon]

Originally posted by Cleopatra


More than you can imagine :)


Thank you very much. Good luck in Milan tomorrow!!
Intriguing ...
Anyway, my pleasure, and thanks. :D

[Jon_in_london]

Originally posted by Dragon

"loved one" would be "an carad" - but this is mutated to "Angharad" - you have to say it properly with a soft "g".



Soft g as in j or as in *clearing throat sound*?

[Dragon]

Originally posted by Jon_in_london


Soft g as in j or as in *clearing throat sound*?

Clearing throat sound - I suppose, but slightly nasal
BTW "Angharad" is a girl's name.
The Welsh for darling is cariad.

[CapelDodger]

Cleopatra:
Mea maxima culpa. I don't open snail mail for weeks either.

Jon_in_london: The "ng" is as in the English suffix "-ing". In Angharad be sure to sound the "h". In the South-West dialect "darling" is "cariad" as opposed to "carad". (Useless fact no 666 for this thread).

Don't Mention Milan. There's serious bad-feeling against the Italian fans and the police( if that's the right term for them). The Welsh fans complained that the pigs were doing nothing to prevent bottles and bricks and seats and urine getting thrown down at them, so the pigs laid into the Welsh with batons. There'll be blood spilled over it one day. Berlusconi - you are on the ****-list.

[Cleopatra]

It's ok Capel Dodger this is the least of your extravaganzas anyway :)

Now, empty your PM Box.

Also, you have to understand that British people have a very bad reputation in Europe when it comes to their behaviour because some of them drink a lot and they totally lose control.

The Police Forces of other countries don't treat them well, most of the times with no reason, they arrest them just for being British, this is true.

[CapelDodger]

Hi Cleopatra:
Also, you have to understand that British people have a very bad reputation in Europe when it comes to their behaviour because some of them drink a lot and they totally lose control.
They have a bad rep for that over here too. Binge drinking is all the rage these days. I avoid Cardiff centre at weekends because of it. I'm a drinker myself, don't get me wrong, but I've never looked forward to a night spent puking outside a kebab-house and getting robbed.

I've lived in tourist spots and I've seen French teenagers behaving appallingly in groups, so it's not just the Brits. On the other hand the British proles seem to be particularly unaware that what they see as a bit-of-fun - say, dropping your trousers in the pub - doesn't seem the same to Turkish guys when it's happening in front of Turkish ladies. For example.

The police round here don't treat us very well either. A word of advice: don't get on the wrong side of the South Wales Police. They are vindictive and ruthless. Allegedly.

[Cleopatra]

To The Welsh and Scottish Leagues:

The Champions League starts tonight.

The football team of Athens-Panathinaikos- is playing Vs Manchester Utd in Old Trafford tonight and if they do not execute us, the beers are on me :D

Mind you British hooligans, we are more fierce and dangerous than you are! http://www.handykult.de/plaudersmilies.de/eviltongue.gif

I am sure that Sundog won't mind for using his thread to post that.

[a_unique_person]

Originally posted by Cleopatra

The Police Forces of other countries don't treat them well, most of the times with no reason, they arrest them just for being British, this is true.

And what is wrong with that?

[Cleopatra]

Sundog

I think that you should consider to ask Linda or Hal to rename this thread.

What about : " Chatting in the "Y Ddraig Goch " pub".

If it turns out to be a success you can sell the story for a sitcom. I don't think that the dialogues of "Sex in the City" are better than those we have in this thread.Ours are more subtle maybe but they are equally...juicy :D