Wandering and Still Pretty Damn Lost

like here’s the thing. there IS a well-known past of queer erasure in the historical field. and I wouldn’t suggest that it’s completely fixed now, don’t get me wrong

but things have changed since the 1950s, folks. I know more queer historians and GLAM workers (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) than straight ones- including me

furthermore, this joke has turned into an excuse to take the nuance out of historical narratives, in a way that really disturbs me

because no, we CANNOT just assume someone was queer just because they [never married/had certain interests/were affectionate with a same-gender friend/presented aesthetically in a way that was counter to their birth-assigned gender]. it’s a huge oversimplification of the vast diversity of human experience, which often totally ignores the broader context of a person’s life to force them into modern identity categories

there are many situations where we can comfortably say, “Okay, this person was what we’d now call queer.” but there are even more where we can’t

if a modern historian seems cagey about a person you think is “clearly gay,” it’s probably because there genuinely isn’t enough evidence to say one way or another. and so, to make a hard call would be to risk potentially misrepresenting that person- which is something we all really try to avoid doing

the tiresome joke not only erases queer historians and the real, important work being done in that sub-field. it also makes people think the only reason for not definitively saying a historical figure was queer is intentional homophobic erasure

NO we’re not Gaelic and NO we do not all worship a moon goddess called Arianrhod (fuck you, Robert Graves) and NO we are not a principality within England and NO our language isn’t made up of only consonants because it actually has more vowels in it than fucking English oh my God can that stereotype die in a sewer already

But you know what we do have?? A goddamn horse skull on a stick which you have to rap battle at Christmas!! A language with phonemes that you only find in like 5 languages on Earth!! The earliest extant references to King Arthur and Merlin, whose original name was Myrddin but was Latinised as ‘Merlinus’ rather than ‘Merdinus’ because apparently ‘Merdinus’ would look too much like the French word for ‘shit’!! COOL HISTORY THAT INSPIRES HOLLYWOOD FILMS!! THIS GODDAMN SHIT

A MOUNTAIN CALLED THE SUGAR LOAF WHICH LOOKS LIKE A NIPPLE

Like, it seems like half the misinformation going around about Welsh is patronising, romanticising bullshit, like uwu hiraeth means homesickness and definitely doesn’t have any colonial context, and neopagan Celtic nonsense about moon goddesses and mother Earth and fucking dancing naked in stone circles at dusk, and the other half is just laughing at a language which was almost decimated after centuries of colonialism, even though the stereotypes about Welsh being a hilarious and stupid language are actually direct tools that the English used to eradicate it, so

Not to get like, Welsh nationalist on main or anything but maybe people could like… fact check before they post stuff about a living language/culture, because we even have WiFi in Wales, y’know, and every post we see about how hilarious Welsh place names are takes 10 years off our lives

The Welsh language is cool as shit because it’s entirely phonetic, so once you’ve learnt the alphabet you can literally read any Welsh word and pronounce it, which is why most people who live here and have learnt Welsh to any degree can pronounce Llanfairpwll in full; it’s just not hard to pronounce, you fools!! You’re out here applauding us for pronouncing something with built-in instructions! Once you know the phonetics, you can probably spell any goddamn word you hear, even if you’ve never heard it before. It’s that easy! English could never!

We don’t have the letters k or j or z or x or v or q but we don’t fucking need them!! You know what we DO have? 29 letters including 8 digraphs, baybey!! ‘Ll’? That’s one letter, not two!! ‘Dd’? ‘Ch?’ ‘Ff’? ‘Ng’? ‘Th’? ‘Rh’? ‘Ph’? One letter, pal. I know. It’s fucking exquisite. Let it sink in for a moment.

You think you know how ‘f’ is pronounced in Welsh? You don’t! It’s pronounced like the English ‘v’! You want that sweet, familiar ‘f’ sound? That’s ‘ff’, my dude! Are you sitting there and crying because you miss your ‘x’? Fuck you, we just mash ‘c’ and ‘s’ together and ‘cs’ does the trick nicely. Oh, you think we miss having a ‘j’? We don’t! That’s what ‘si’ is for! And who needs a ‘k’ when your ‘c’ is always pronounced the hard way? We’re economical like that, baby.

And as for those pesky vowels which everyone knows Welsh doesn’t have? FUCK YOU DUDE, WE HAVE 7! You think you’re so smart with your a, e, i, o, u? Try a, e, i, o, u, w, y, fucker!! You think words like ‘ffwrdd’ are hilarious because there’s 6 consonants and no vowels? Wrong, fucko! There’s 3 consonants and a vowel!

You like diphthongs? We’ve got plenty! We’ve got vowels coming out of our assholes, baby, and we know to use ‘em! You want a cheeky little ‘eu’, or perhaps a saucy little ‘wy’? Maybe go really wild and throw in a little ‘yw’? The sky’s your limit when you’ve got a sweet stash of vowels like these!

Don’t even get me started on mutations, because I’ll throw up from excitement!! We’re a Celtic language, baby, so we have all those spicy initial consonant mutations! You want a soft mutation, a nasal mutation, or an aspirate mutation? You have to pick just one. Psych! You get all three! What a sweet fucking deal!

As someone who grew up with spanish as my first language (and then majored in english cause I hate myself) my experience with welsh has always been “huh, that’s funny if you try to pronounce it using english phonetics, but then again, so is LITERALLY EVERYTHING INCLUDING ENGLISH WORDS.”

The idea of w and y as vowels is not uncommon, and neither are “double letters”. In spanish L and LL are different letters, same with R and RR, N and Ñ. I tend to default to spanish phonetics when reading other languages, and I know that my pronunciation is still wrong, but it definitely takes away that weird english-centric idiocy concerning other languages.

For funsies, I see Llanfairpwyll and my head reads it as Yán-“fire”-pui-yh. Which I know is wrong, but still very much reads as a word and not a keysmash. (Which reminds me that I gotta go do Duolingo again.)

But yeah, more languages need to stick up for Welsh and other regularly ridiculed languages. Let’s recognize this mockery for the exposure of cultural ignorance that it is, and pity those poor fools.

Like, here’s a sample of some of the comments on a Wikitongues video of a man speaking Welsh (he’s a professional broadcaster, so his enunciation and diction are actually incredibly clear):

Most of those comments are basically just the same, tired old stereotype about Welsh being a consonant soup, even though it’s a video of a man speaking Welsh and it’s actually a very lilting, musical language with lots of vowels and diphthongs when you hear it out loud. They’re just repeating the easy jokes and what they ‘know’ to be true about Welsh (i.e. that it doesn’t have any vowels and everything’s spelt funny.)

A few of them make direct comparisons to how it sounds like a weird version of English, which Welsh doesn’t really have much phonology in common with at all, and there’s several comments about it sounding like some sort of impediment. Other comparisons to English rely on the orthography, and how it just looks like a keyboard smash written down, because they literally cannot comprehend that not all languages use the same structures.

And like you say, I think it’s totally normal to look at other languages written down and try and apply the phonology and orthography that you know - there are a few words in English that I can’t help but read with Welsh phonology, like if I see a word that ends in ‘-ell’ I quite frequently make the Welsh ‘ll’ consonant sound in my brain, but the difference is that, just like you with your Spanish phonology, I don’t then go ‘hahahahaha how dumb that the word isn’t actually pronounced like that!! What a stupid language!!’ And I think that colonialism and Anglocentrism has a lot to do with it.

I think your point about spelling things phonetically being seen as a ‘dumb’ thing to do in English is also super relevant, because there has historically been a view of Welsh people as actual idiots (one of the tools used in the erasure of the language was an official government report, the so-called Blue Books, which said that Welsh people’s language and failure to embrace English instead made us stupid and immoral) and viewing the language as inferior, disgusting to listen to and impossible to spell was a very useful way of shaming people for speaking it and making them speak English instead.

We do have J! We stole it and it’s ours now! They can’t have it back! It’s letter number 29! Languages evolve and we got our grubby Welsh hands on it so we can say “jam” and that’s the tea on that.

Boy howdy the rest is true, though. Anyway, here’s my husband’s take on trying to learn bloody English when you’ve grown up Welsh speaking:

Harrow the Ninth but just the memes Part 2

“Coming back for the second film, I think the audience, they were so surprised that it wasn’t just a carbon copy of Star Wars, I think that’s what really made it distinctive.”