#gofyn

Hello @runin-reads Just getting round to this ask now but there's a few things I know of which might help. Followers feel free to add on any more as well!

Resources:

Free Welsh coursebooks from DysguCymraeg available to download on their website

Free collection of Welsh dictionaries available to view on The Internet Archive

Cysill and Cysgeir are free to download here. Cysill is a Welsh grammar checker that checks for correct spelling, mutations etc. Cysgeir is a Welsh dictionary app. Both were developed by Bangor University and are free to download on Windows.

Gweiadur is a free online Welsh dictionary which not only has a comprehensive guide to Welsh words, but also provides example sentences, idioms and conjugation tables.

Shwmae! Amazingly, you are the literal target audience for Ynys' first album ('Ynys', 2022). Dylan Hughes is from Aberystwyth and spent many years in Cardiff and found himself longing for the seaside he grew up in, and when he finally started writing music as Ynys (he used to be in a cool indie psychedelic band called Race Horses too, if that's your thing), he put together a whole album only to realise how much of it is about the sea. I mean, his band is literally called Ynys (Island)!

Also, he has that wonderful, lush psychedelic pop sound, which I think sounds pretty happy musically, though there are definitely some themes of longing, being lost, culture and language, all that good stuff thrown in too. It's complex, but I still feel it's quite a happy listen!

So some songs from the album I'd recommend - Môr Du (Black Sea), Welcome to the Island (now technically this is an instrumental, don't know where that sits!), There's Nothing The Sea Doesn't Know.

My personal favourite off the album is Caneuon (‘Songs’, references the Gorky's Zygotic Mynci song 'Gegin Nos'—more on them in a sec—and also a pretty happy/reminiscing/wistful song), but the whole album is quite good, and their recent second album Dosbarth Nos also has some lovely songs that lift my mood at least— Aros Amdanat Ti, Gyda Ni, Dosbarth Nos. Also the sea references continue!

I'm linking their Bandcamp page rather than a Spotify because Dylan makes sure to include lyrics and translations on there (and in physical liner notes), if you or anyone else reading this was interested in going into the lyrics! (Also I usually feel like I should give people the option to directly support musicians if they feel inclined, where Spotify pays not even cents for most music.) But these two albums are on streaming if you'd like too!

I've also gotta recommend some Gorky's! Their 1997 album's called Barafundle, named after Barafundle Beach, and while I don't think any of the songs are directly about the sea itself (except like The Barafundle Bumbler, which uh. Your mileage may vary. It’s about a voyeur bloke that sits by the seaside on said beach), but there's Diamond Dew which is such a lovely tune, and while not about the sea, Patio Song (i.e. everyone's favourite Gorky's song) has that lovely outro of 'it is raining, so take my hand, the winter's so long, it takes so much of the earth'. ☔️🌧🌈 Happy music, some of Gorky's work! (Personal fave off the album: Starmoonsun <3)

(Also this song's in English but since we're talking about Gorky's I can't not recommend Spanish Dance Troupe. Gorgeous song.)

There's also the super cool Adwaith, who wrote the song Lan Y Môr. This song is actually a lot older than the album it ended up on, 2022's Welsh Music Prize winning Bato Mato, Adwaith are still the only musicians to win the Prize twice. They wrote the song and released it as a single back in early 2020 and it was following a run of really cool punky Cymraeg singles. Love Adwaith, they're quite cool.

Edit: HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN. The queen of the beaches. Gwenno herself. I guess I hadn’t included her because this isn’t technically a Welsh language album (save for one song, N.Y.C.A.W. (Nid Yw Cymru Ar Werth)). Gwenno is half-Welsh, half-Cornish, and this album was basically written down at St. Ives. This does sound like it, and I love this song Anima!

that's a very good question, thanks for asking it!!

i honestly love all plus size gale arts equally <3 but if i had to pick my favourites they'd be these ones :3 enjoy!

and feel free to send any more my way <3 whether that be art or fanfiction!

idk if i should even be speaking on this bc i dont know the history of welsh but i feel like you literally dont need to know the history behind it to see something very wrong with "speakers of a minority language should shut up if they're not actively being killed for it"

Sorry I took so long in getting to this ask (post anon is referring to) but yeah- that post was gobsmacking to me as a Welsh speaker. I've studied language loss and revitalisation and I can name several endangered languages in which children (and adults) were beaten and abused for speaking their native tongue. For example, we covered the Tlingit language in Alaska (one of the few North American languages I've studied) which is subject to a revival- some Tlingit wanted to learn the language, while others (usually older people) had an aversion to the language. One man said that whenever he speaks Tlingit he can taste soap because he was punished as a boy for speaking Tlingit by having a bar of soap put in his mouth. Language loss via abuse is real and prevalent in many, many endangered languages. The audacity to assume Welsh is somehow immune to that was astounding.

But even if Welsh *was* immune to that somehow (it wasn't) you're right in that we should care about the decline of a language even if it doesn't involve overt suppression. More surreptitious kinds of linguistic genocide lie within the state apparatus. For example, when Wales was merged into the Kingdom of England (see: the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542) the language of the legal system in Wales was changed to English-only, depriving monolingual Welsh speakers (Welsh was spoken in pretty much every part of Wales at this point) of legal services. This meant that Welsh speakers were effectively pressured indirectly to learn English in order to have a chance at any legal services in court. Over time, the privileging of English over Welsh created a pressure to abandon Welsh in favour of English, because there were 'more opportunities' in English than in Welsh.

Similarly, the true Treachery of the Blue Books wasn't that the British Government in 1847 had ordered a review into Welsh schools and found that too many people were speaking Welsh- but that Welsh-speaking parents began to forbid their children from learning Welsh and supported the findings of the inquiry because they too had felt that pressure of English-language supremacy. Believing that there's more opportunities in English than in Welsh. It's an unfortunate legacy and attitude which still persists today- and none of the Commissioners of the Blue Book Inquiry shed any blood in doing so. But the impact was nonetheless dire. It's also a self-creating cycle: There are no opportunities in Welsh -> People learn English instead of Welsh for opportunities -> There's fewer Welsh speakers to create more opportunities in Welsh ->There are no opportunities in Welsh.

https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=VUxHxiOpKk2b1OzjcUjbsislyVxFZm9Asu7rF11HsxRURTVSSjM1QVFZV0NONkIzUElPRFFCNE5WUC4u&web=1&wdLOR=cAA1F7410-25D3-44E5-A145-8E1737F31A54

- only formed to oppose the Welsh Underground Network (Marxists)

- used to call for an ethno-state on their site before scrubbing it (I remembered this, but didn't know they scrubbed it)

- several key members and leaders are fascists (I've heard one refers to himself as a Mosely fascist?)

- supported by Royston (jac o the north)

There was more but I don't have it to hand

Okay so I whacked their url into wayback machine and they 100% call for a Welsh ethnostate. Like, really really unambiguously - source here - snapshot from the 26th January 2023.

Point 2 explicitly calls for an ethnostate, with point 4 reinforcing that - point 9 makes a broader 'Celtic' ethnicity claim to boot. Point 10 is literally just ecofascism ('uncontrolled growth' as a dogwhistle for 'overpopulation' here methinks).

As of the 11th of May 2023 the '10 Principles' were the same as above. The snapshots of September and October won't load for me for some reason but presently their webpage says "2. Wales is an ancient Celtic nation with a right to self-determination and independence from the United Kingdom" instead of the ethnostate stuff.

Also your other points ring true as well, on their site they also complain about the Welsh independence movement being full of Marxists. And I'm not surprised they're self-confessed fascists either - especially Mosleyan,

What a bunch of conts.

I’m not sure whether this is overstepping, but I was wondering if you have any advice for academic enrichment in the mean time- I have limited knowledge of Welsh itself because even though my dad can speak it, I was never really taught it. I went to the uni open day, and they recommended ‘Say Something in Welsh’ which looks like a really good resource, and I was wondering if you knew any sites (or books!) which could be good to further look into, especially if you know where I could find medieval Welsh literature in modern Welsh online.

Also, I’m interested in Welsh history and language conservation, and if you have any book recommendations on those I’d definitely check them out!

Sorry for the long ask, I hope this finds you well

I'm so sorry anon that I'm getting to this so late (it's been months -mae'n ddrwg gyda fi!) but I will try and answer some of your questions now.

The Celtic Studies department at Aberystwyth is really lovely and quite small so everyone kinda knows each other. My Welsh teacher and personal tutor was Simon Rodway - he's a really lovely guy and was the first member of staff I shared my chosen name with (he helped me find out how to change my name on the Uni systems to my chosen name as well).

I've heard good things about SaySomethingInWelsh - the Uni also does (in the Celtic Studies department) intense summer courses in Welsh in person and online (I did mine online because pandemic) with DysgyCymraeg, who I also recommend. I have a post about free Welsh learning resources here:

For Medieval Welsh literature in Modern Welsh - dafyddapgwilym.net has a collection of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poetry in the original Middle Welsh, Modern Welsh and in English translation. Just click Cymraeg or English, go to Y Cerddi/The Poems and select a poem from the drop-down menu. More options will come up when you do this (including notes and where you can find the manuscripts the poems are from). I'm not usually a Medievalist so I'm gonna ask if any of my followers/mutuals have any recommendations for this.

For Welsh language conservation- (or language conservation in general) I would check out the module "Language Revitalisation in a Global Context" - usually run by Ben (another really sound lad from the department who teaches Irish and Scottish Gaelic) - I think that module is available in Second and/or Third year. But I do recommend it!

Apologies for answering this so late - feel free to send another message if you have any more questions.

Thank you for the ask! I go about my ancestry research in a very specific way, but I'm happy to describe what I tend to do.

Researching your ancestry (or the ancestry of historical people etc.):

My number one tip for researching ancestry is having perseverance and patience in spades. It's important to know going in that you will get led up blind alleys, dead ends and amass plenty of non-starters, but don't get put off by this! In my experience, the information you're looking for is there, but you have to get real creative about how you go about finding it. Subscriptions to genealogy sites can be helpful too, but aren't a necessity if you're only interested in going a few generations back.

My number two tip is that in general, you will have more information starting out than you think you do. To use myself as an example, when I sat down to research my ancestry, all I knew about my biological family was my birth mother's name, birth city and date of birth - my grandparent's names and dates of birth and a few patchy bits of information about aunts etc. That was 3 years ago. Since then, I've been able to trace ancestors to the second half of the 17th Century. I don't know anything about my biological father's side, so my research was all matrilineal. Starting with my grandparents, I was able to cross-reference entries in the register of births to confirm I had the right people. Once you successfully do this, you can then start on locating your grandparent's parents. In my case, I went from knowing about 2 ancestors to 6 - adding in the 4 which are my matrilineal grandparent's parents. Then repeat the process as far back as evidence and records will allow.

My number three tip concerns the how of researching ancestors. It's all well and good saying 'confirm if X is the parent of Y' but how that's done is another matter.

Taking my own ancestors, lately I've been looking into my Irish ancestors. My matrilineal grandmother's maiden name begins with B [full name redacted for privacy] (naturally you'll need to acquire maiden names of female ancestors for certain bits - this can be done by speaking to family members if that's possible, or by ordering a copy of their marriage certificate. General Register Office index records in the UK will also display maiden names and appear on mainstream subscription genealogy sites). Having ordered my grandmother's marriage certificate and found her GRO index record, I was able to find her maiden name B. as well as her father's name. So then the next step is to find records of that name which match known details (e.g. the marriage certificate usually lists a profession, in the case of my great-grandfather, he worked in sheet metal). In order to identify my great-grandfather with 100% certainty, context like my grandmother's place of birth (Stockport) and year of birth (1950) theoretically places him in Stockport around that year (given 9 months leeway at least) - there's exceptions such as if a male ancestor died before their child was born or if they were never in the picture, but generally this is a rule of thumb. The next thing to do is find records of my great-grandfather in Stockport around 1950 - give or take ~10 years (this is more difficult with more recent ancestors due to census data not being available for most of the 20th Century yet). If one were to look at the 1939 Register (accessible via mainstream genealogy sites and in-person at Kew for free) a person matching my grandmother's father's first name, middle name and surname and who is married and worked in sheet metal is recorded in the same district my grandmother would be born in in 1950. A good start - but as with any good research, you gotta corroborate. In most cases, it would be fine to presume at this point that the woman my great-grandfather is married to in the 1939 Register is my grandmother's mother. However, upon checking the GRO Index of births, my great-grandfather and his wife's name do not come up when searching for my grandmother's birth record. Instead, my great-grandfather's name comes up with a different name. To be brief, the actual situation is that he separated from his first spouse before my grandmother who was born. Thus why his wife in 1939 *isn't* my great-grandmother. Upon checking the second spouse's name against the GRO index, my great-grandfather married her in the 1980s (thus legitimising my grandmother - one can only assume the law and taboo around divorce led to the delay in marrying his new spouse). Great-grandmother's name confirmed. So that gives me both my great-grandparent's names. But sticking with my great-grandfather, lets say I want to trace his father. Knowing more detail about my great-grandfather's later life means I can double check details of his early life. After having ordered his marriage certificate with his second wife (most certificates on the GRO are about £11 with second class post) I find out his father's name. Through that, I repeat the process above to verify and corroborate his father's details to match him 100%. Assuming by now I have my great-grandfather's parent's names through this method, I can locate his birth record on the GRO index and find my great-grandfather was born in 1912 in Liverpool.

And so on and so forth. If you're not in the UK you'll have to look up what resources (paid and free) are available in your country - but some records are possible to find online. My ancestors above were Catholic, so this resource was no use to me. But the Church of England Parish Clerk records for Lancashire are available online here, for example - with similar sites existing for other counties. Another thing is to make use of Boolean commands on Google. Typing "ancestor name" "[year]" "[city or town]" can bring up results - e.g. digitised books, records and newspapers in the public domain are indexed by Google and if you ancestor is mentioned in any of them, they will come up. This happened for me with an ancestor on my grandfather's side - some County Councils keep some historical records online and it turned out one of my ancestors had had sex with two men in 1769 (I guess it must have been the Summer of 69 tbqh!) who were both possibly the father of her child - the court decided they both had to pay child support to the parish (who actually raised the child ).

But remember that you can easily be led up blind alleys, so my biggest tip is still to corroborate and check your work as you go along. Like with my example, if I assumed my great-grandfather's first wife was my great-grandmother, I would have gone completely in the wrong direction. Historical records have a habit of being slippery fish so it's good practice to be critical of sources and make sure you're clear on the timeline of things. If you're using a paid genealogy site, getting things wrong or assuming things can affect other users (if they see your family tree and it has wrong information in it, that can mislead people down the wrong path as well). I've seen this mostly with North American users who might get a fact wrong about a European ancestor and will not notice, causing a lot of headache in setting the record straight. Carelessness from other users pollutes the timeline and can make it difficult for others to research an ancestor you have in common with them if you get it wrong. If you're researching an ancestor who is only a theory or a hypothesis, there are tags you can put on that ancestor's page which show they're a hypothesis/theory - which can really help others know so they don't take the information you have on the ancestor as fact. Despite this, still have fun with it and enjoy finding out more about your relatives - I hope that you're able to find this answer somewhat useful.

If you (or anyone else reading this) has any more questions, you are very welcome to make a comment or send another ask.