三十郎SeaCow

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:

Yeah, Welsh is amazing, yes they way it’s spelled looks incomprehensible to me, but that’s because I don’t know the pronunciation rules. Yes, that is a direct result of Anglocentrism.

But here’s the thing: The majority of English speakers DO uderstand how different languages have differences in pronunciation rules while having the same characters in the written form. Every kid I know had to take Spanish classes really young and they all understand fine that ll makes a y sound and ñ sounds like ny. We drop the h sound in “hola” because we know it’s not pronounced with that. So why is Welsh so hard for us to grasp?

It’s. Its really not. All of you Welsh speakers up there, reading those words are natural for you because you were raised with it and you were raised knowing that the characters making up your alphabet and mine are pretty much the ONLY similarity.

We’re not taught that. Like, at all. Welsh is just not talked about in schools or media. We see those words and absolutely no one told us that in Welsh, w is a vowel. No one. That’s why it’s incomprehensible to the average English speaker at first glance. No one told us that it’s pronounced with anything other than the phonetics we know.

And that is a direct result of Anglocentrism, colonialism, and trying to kill Welsh. Because historically, if we knew your language actually makes sense, we’d stop insisting English is superior and therefore can’t take you over. And British imperialism can’t have that.

There are no Welsh speakers in Wales who don’t also speak English. The last enclaves of Welsh-only speakers died out a few decades ago. My post wasn’t a rant about ‘why don’t the Saeson understand us? Why don’t they know how beautiful our language actually is?!’ but rather very much a rant about how they quite deliberately don’t give a shit. How it’s easy to uphold the comfortable narrative about why your language / culture is The Best, and fully deserves to be implemented in place of another - if anything, you’re doing them a favour! - if you propagate the spread of misinformation about that other language / culture. How the dissemination of this misinformation is a feature, not a bug. How this is partly a result of Anglocentrism, but more so a deliberate tool of good ol’ fashioned colonialism.

I respectfully don’t think this is true:

[…] if we knew your language actually makes sense, we’d stop insisting English is superior and therefore can’t take you over. And British imperialism can’t have that.

England knew very well that Welsh made sense when they tried to stamp it out. The reason they tried to eradicate Welsh (and indeed all the other languages they did the same thing to) wasn’t because they didn’t understand the grammar, or because the orthography freaked them out. It was because the first step to gaining complete control of a colonised nation is to replace their culture with yours. To cut off their routes of rebellion; to stop them from organising in their own language. To make sure that you can control their communication, the way they express themselves. To cut out their tongue and make sure they only speak words you can understand.

And even now, the people who go ‘hurrr hurr Welsh is a keyboard smash’ know that it’s a full language, that it has grammar and syntax and orthography. The first part of the problem is that they view it as an inferior language spoken by an inferior culture, and therefore ripe for parody. The second part is that this is a useful opinion to have when you want to justify your occupation of another territory / assuage any possible guilt about your role in their subjugation / continue exploiting that nation for resources / convince that nation that independence is an impossibility.

I’m going to assume (possibly erroneously; apologies if so) that you’re American, purely given that you learn Spanish in school and we generally learn either French or German in the UK. I’m therefore going to assume that you possibly don’t know the history of England and Wales in particular. So, here’s the thing: Welsh didn’t decline just because we’re in close proximity to England and it made sense to learn to speak English. It declined because our ancestors were forbidden from speaking it. They were told that their language was primitive and precluded their moral and cultural development, that their language (and also their religion; Welsh religion is largely nonconformist compared to England) made them lazy and immoral. Children in Welsh schools were beaten for speaking Welsh. There were generations where parents were afraid to pass their language onto their children, so they didn’t.

Welsh speakers subsequently declined to under 20% of the population, but has had a resurgence in recent years owing to a very concerted effort and a lot of work by the now devolved government, and around 30% of the population now classes themselves as able to speak Welsh, with about half of those people using it on a daily basis. Hopefully the upwards trajectory will continue, but even now you get people moaning about how it’s just so difficult to find your way around Wales because all the road signs are bilingual; why can’t they just be in English? It’s not fair that some public-facing jobs will prioritise hiring Welsh speakers; isn’t that discrimination against monoglot English speakers? It’s so rude when you go into a public space and people around you are speaking Welsh; how do you know they’re not speaking about you? The attitudes surrounding Welsh pervade, and I can only see them increasing in retaliation to the language’s resurgence.

kirby:

you go to the well to get some water, and here’s Miriam’s boy, staring at the sky, completely still. his expression is unreadable. you hazard a hello and ask how he’s doing, and he slowly, unblinkingly, lowers his gaze on you (he’s 8 and is missing his frontal teeth, not that this is making you any less uncomfortable) and says “I cannot speak of the state of my being, Nathan son of Saul, my brother, but rejoice for the water you shall take today will be as pure as the soul of the children of Heaven”

*sees J boy, 8 yo, staring at you from across the street*

kid JC, coming home at twilight, a single white dove following him and chirping with weirdly human-like precision:

 moth̫́er,̦͌ ̮̉i h͙̉av͔̽e ͓͗b̘̃r̞̓o̮͘u̲̒gh̟͒t̺́ you a do̗͐ṽ͙e̢͘ ͈̾m͒͢a͈̽dē̝ ỏ̘f ͈̓c̆͜l͔̂aỷ͇ aṋ̑d̳̿ g͢͞i̹̾fted̖͡ ̻͐it ͓͂w̖̿it̎͜h t̥̃h͙͒e ̨̒m̧̂i̡̍ŗ͒â̫cḷ̔è̤ ̛̻of̞̅ l̘̈i̛̦fè̳

Miriam: ! that’s my little boy :) now let’s go get ready for dinner :) 

her husband Yosef, a carpenter who only marginally got signed up for this: 

THOU is the subject (Thou art…) THEE is the object (I look at thee) THY is for words beginning in a consonant (Thy dog) THINE is for words beginning in a vowel (Thine eyes)

Further to the PSA:

Thou/thee/thine is SINGULAR ONLY.

Verbs with “thou” end in -st or -est: thou canst, thou hast, thou dost, thou goest.  Exception: the verbs will, shall, are, and were, which add only -t: thou wilt, thou shalt, thou art, thou wert.

Only in the indicative, though – when saying how things are (“Thou hast a big nose”).  Not in the subjunctive, saying how things might be (“If thou go there…”) nor in the imperative, making instructions or requests (“Go thou there”).

The -eth or -th ending on verbs is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT TO THE -(e)s ENDING IN MODERN ENGLISH.

I go, thou goest, she goeth, we go, ye go, they go.

If you wouldn’t say “goes” in modern English, don’t say “goeth” in Shakespearean English.

“Goeth and getteth me a coffee” NO.  KILL IT WITH FIRE.

Usually with an imperative you put the pronoun immediately after the verb, at least once in the sentence (“Go thou” / “Go ye”).

YE is the subject (Ye are…).  YOU is the object.

Ye/you/your is both for PLURALS and for DEFERENCE, as vous in French.

This was written in Modern English.

This was writ in Elizabethan English.

Þis was ywritten in Middelenglisch.