#welsh language

So it's kind of like Mercher means Wednes-, and Sadwrn means Satur- and Iau means Thurs-, and these are kind of bound roots in Welsh. But there is one thing you can say in Welsh. If you say some part of the day, like prynhawn, which means afternoon, you don't have to say dydd, which means day. So it's like saying Prynhawn Iau is allowed and it means Thursday afternoon, but it's more like it's literally Thursafternoon, which makes sense, because it's not the whole day you're talking about. It's just the afternoon. It's like they let you say both today and tonight in English (sadly the welsh word for today is heddiw and doesn't contain dydd) but for the days of the week and more than just day and night.

'Awen' is one of those Welsh words without a clean English translation, it's the kind of divine creative spark that brings inspiration to poets and musicians.

The Welsh national anthem (by James and Evan James, depicted in the sculptures shown) contains reference to awen in the lines:

Os treisiodd y gelyn fy ngwlad tan ei droed, Mae hen iaith y Cymry mor fyw ag erioed, Ni luddiwyd yr awen gan erchyll law brad, Na thelyn berseiniol fy ngwlad.

Here is an English translation, although 'spirit' is a somewhat weak interpretation of 'awen' here!

I have Welsh in my blood, I have Welsh in my family. I wasn’t born there, but I’m still Welsh.

In England, I was teased in high-school for being partly Welsh (I was often called “sheep-shagger”) but now I’ve moved to Wales I’m too English. I can’t speak Welsh, I have little connection to the culture, and my family who ARE fully Welsh are either dead, don’t speak to me or don’t interact with the culture or speak Welsh.

Still, I want to learn Welsh. Despite a lot of my Welsh friends and family not speaking it. I feel like it needs to be done??

Cymro Dw I.

I am Welsh.

"Keighra" for Ciara

"Luighseach" for Lucy

"Madysyn" for Madison

and there's so many more, I think it's right to call parents selfish by doing this, apparently schools now have entire classes full of kids with names people won't be able to spell or sound out easily, it's not a new name it's just rebranded,

BUT

These patterns of how they spell the names aren't random. They're not just made up. They ARE reused in a new way that breaks previous English-language rules, but these come from an orthography that was not English. The earliest Irish system of using the Latin alphabet predates the existence of English and the entire concept of England.

Those extra vowels and consonants had meaning, and morphological importance, and were said out loud, before pronunciations changed over centuries (language always changes) and spellings were simplified - usually forcibly, by the English. It happened in English, too - for example "neighbor" a long time ago had a sound for the "gh", a more throaty version of the "ch" in German - but for Irish, Scottish, Welsh? The English throughout most of their shared history restricted these languages as tight as they could in an effort to kill the language.

And there's something so, so, so interesting about the tragedy of so many miseducated, unable to travel, isolated and uncurious USAmericans not even realizing their family once had another language than English or that Irish as a language even exists, that the names they see and think are cool and trendy are kind of like . . . Name zombies. Reborn but in a corrupted way, like a massive game of generational telephone. Incorrect for both the target language and the borrowing language.

i just had a weird moment of remembering someone saying the word joke in welsh and then realising that can't possibly actually be what joke is in welsh because that would be dumb and then further realised they don't even have a letter j in welsh and i don't even know how you would spell a j sound without the letter j (in either english or welsh for that matter). and then i questioned if all my life ive been wrong about half the welsh languge just being english words pronounced sort welshy because that cant possibly be the word for joke and i probably only had the habit of just saying english words kinda welshy because i was a kid and didn't know the actual word for things and would get yelled at for speaking english. so then i had to go and look up what the real welsh word was for joke and...