Welsh Language Quotes

Do you miss Wales?” Tessa inquired. Will shrugged lightly. “What’s to miss? Sheep and singing,” he said. “And the ridiculous language. Fe hoffwn i fod mor feddw, fyddai ddim yn cofio fy enw.” “What does that mean?” “It means ‘I wish to get so drunk I no longer remember my own name,’ Quite useful.

Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbors Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.

She even learnt the language of a strange country which Senior Cosetti had been told some people believed still existed, although no-one in the world could say where it was. The name of this country was Wales.

Ah fuckin hate the way some American cunts call lassies cunts. Fuckin offensive, that shite.

It had been June, the bright hot summer of 1937, and with the curtains thrown back the bedroom had been full of sunlight, sunlight and her and Will's children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews- Cecy's blue eyed boys, tall and handsome, and Gideon and Sophie's two girls- and those who were as close as family: Charlotte, white- haired and upright, and the Fairchild sons and daughters with their curling red hair like Henry's had once been. The children had spoken fondly of the way he had always loved their mother, fiercely and devotedly, the way he had never had eyes for anyone else, and how their parents had set the model for the sort of love they hoped to find in their own lives. They spoke of his regard for books, and how he had taught them all to love them too, to respect the printed page and cherish the stories that those pages held. They spoke of the way he still cursed in Welsh when he dropped something, though he rarely used the language otherwise, and of the fact that though his prose was excellent- he had written several histories of the Shadowhunters when he's retired that had been very well respected- his poetry had always been awful, though that never stopped him from reciting it. Their oldest child, James, had spoken laughingly about Will's unrelenting fear of ducks and his continual battle to keep them out of the pond at the family home in Yorkshire. Their grandchildren had reminded him of the song about demon pox he had taught them- when they were much too young, Tessa had always thought- and that they had all memorized. They sang it all together and out of tune, scandalizing Sophie. With tears running down her face, Cecily had reminded him of the moment at her wedding to Gabriel when he had delivered a beautiful speech praising the groom, at the end of which he had announced, "Dear God, I thought she was marrying Gideon. I take it all back," thus vexing not only Cecily and Gabriel but Sophie as well- and Will, though too tired to laugh, had smiled at his sister and squeezed her hand. They had all laughed about his habit of taking Tessa on romantic "holidays" to places from Gothic novels, including the hideous moor where someone had died, a drafty castle with a ghost in it, and of course the square in Paris in which he had decided Sydney Carton had been guillotined, where Will had horrified passerby by shouting "I can see the blood on the cobblestones!" in French.

Perhaps Welsh fairies stole children and confiscated their vowels.

...and said grace in Welsh. It was all rolling, thundering language.

Some other facts I picked up: Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbours Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard. Baked beans are very popular in England. For breakfast. On toast. On baked potatoes. They can't get enough. "American History" is not a subject everywhere. England and Britain and the United Kingdom are not the same thing. England is the country. Britain is the island containing England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is the formal designation of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as a political entity. If you mess this up, you will be corrected. Repeatedly.

In the Welsh language there is a particularly beautiful word: ‘Hiraeth’. It has no direct English translation, but the general sense of the term is an overwhelming feeling of grief and longing for one’s people and land of the past, a kind of amplified spiritual homesickness for a place one has never been to.

We don’t really communicate […]. We talk all right, talk in that strange language we’ve evolved for the purposes of avoiding communication. That non-language we’ve created. Perhaps it’s a sign that civilisation is regressing. Something is anyway.

Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.

This young woman," he indicated Miss Wintertowne, "she has, I dare say, all the usual accomplishments and virtues? She was graceful? Witty? Vivacious? Capricious? Danced like sunlight? Rode ilk the wind? Sang like an angel? Embroidered like Penelope? Spoke French, Italian, German, Breton, Welsh and many other languages?" Mr. Norrell said he supposed so. He believed that those were the sorts of things young ladies did nowadays.

It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest....

They’d never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester.

I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much. I love Wales (what is left of it, when mines, and the even more ghastly sea-side resorts, have done their worst), and especially the Welsh language.

But the nation’s business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches.

She lived quite alone and whether the fault was hers or whether the fault was theirs I do not know. And a great deal of time went by and she did not speak to a living soul and a great wind of madness howled through her and overturned all her languages. And she forgot Italian, forgot English, forgot Latin, forgot Basque, forgot Welsh, forgot every thing in the world except Cat – and that, it is said, she spoke marvellously well.

But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn’t understand. They’d never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester.

Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all from this small corner of the earth.

With five billion people in the world you couldn’t pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn’t understand. They’d never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or VAT. Or Manchester. He’d been particularly pleased with Manchester.

And why did this Probert pretend to be so Welsh? I remembered that like me he’d been awarded nought for Welsh in School Certificate. Such a result, in that language, means an almost psychotic ignorance. It’s standard practice, of course, with writers of Probert’s allegiance to pretend to be wild valley babblers, woaded with pit-dirt and sheep-shit, thinking in Welsh the whole time and obsessed by terrible beauty, etc., but in fact they tend to come from comfortable middle-class homes, have a good urban education, never go near a lay preacher and couldn’t even order a pint in Welsh, falling back, as Probert had done earlier in the evening, on things like the Welsh for big Jesus. (And don’t tell me they can think in Welsh without knowing the language. Ever tried thinking in Bantu?)

Our English tongue, which hath been the most harsh, uneven, and broken language of the world, part Dutch, part Irish, Saxon, Scotch, Welsh, and indeed a gallimaufry of many, but perfect in none, is now by this secondary means of playing, continually refined, every writer striving in himself to add a new flourish unto it; so that in process, from the most rude and unpolished tongue, it is grown to a most perfect and composed language, and many excellent works and elaborate poems writ in the same, that many nations grow enamored of our tongue (before despised).

But Welsh spellings are as nothing compared with Irish Gaelic, a language in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate rooms, while implacably divided over some deep semantic issue. Try pronouncing geimhreadh, Gaelic for “winter,” and you will probably come up with something like “gem-reed-uh.” It is in fact “gyeeryee.” Beaudhchais (“thank you”) is “bekkas” and Ó Séaghda (“Oh-seeg-da?”) is simply “O’Shea.” Against this, the Welsh pronunciation of cwrw—“koo-roo”—begins to look positively self-evident.

The de Sudeley mission of 1178 had its roots in the turbulent years of the 1st century CE when Roman legions were advancing on Jerusalem and secret scrolls, maps and artifacts were hidden in the tunnels below the subterranean area of the Temple Mount. As I have recounted, in the early years of the 12th century, these items were found by early members of the Knights Templar. More than fifty years later, after much planning, de Sudeley completed a mission likely first envisioned by his Templar predecessors in Jerusalem. He left a detailed log compiled during the voyage, describing the year he spent in Onteora with the community that guarded the scrolls. He recorded geographic sites he had been to, Native Americans he met, and the community of Welsh and Norse he lived with in the Hunter Mountain area. His account was added to the existing record kept by the Templars at Castrum Sepulchri. Latin was the common language at this time, and the monk who recorded de Sudeley's deposition used it to write the record entitled, "A Year We Remember." This account was then added to the writings from the earlier 12th century Templar excavations in Jerusalem to comprise parts of the Templar Document.

Behind these practical studies lay powerful, intertwined, and potentially contradictory beliefs: that language provides a key to the rational, scientific understanding of the world and that language is more than human speech, that it claims a divine origin and is the means by which God created the cosmos and Adam named the beasts. As we will see, both ideas strongly influenced the Inklings, whose leading members wrote many words about the meaning of words. For Owen Barfield, language is the fossil record of the history and evolution of human consciousness; for C. S. Lewis, it is a mundane tool that "exists to communicate whatever it can communicate" but also, as in That Hideous Strength, an essential part of our metaphysical makeup for good or ill; for Charles Williams, language is power, a field of force for the magician, a vehicle of prayer for the believing Christian; for Tolkien, language is a fallen human instrument and a precious divine gift ("O felix peccatum Babel!" he exclaimed in his essay "English and Welsh"), a supreme art, and, as "Word", a name for God.

Living in Wales, an almost island, the seafaring Welsh have had an aptness for travel, yet have been, for the most part, short on resources. This has led to some very imaginative thinking, with otherworldly results, bypassing the expense and hassle of maintaining, say, a populated space station. In the nineteenth century the Welsh colonized the impossible: the barren lands of Patagonia. In the same century things were so bad on the ground that they spent most of the time trying to colonize Heaven, where it was presumed Welsh was the official language. At the same time the heroic Chartist revolutionaries of 1839 imagined a better, fairer society for their children and were given free tickets to Australia.* As a Welsh pop musician I have been given a ticket to a lifestyle once afforded only to soldiers, Miss Universe contestants and long-distance truck drivers.

We'd become aliens in our own land," he'd warned, "denied our own laws, our own language, even our yesterdays, for a conquered people are not allowed a prideful past. Worst of all, we'd be leaving our children and grandchildren a legacy of misery and loss, a future bereft of hope.

The recorded history of the early Britons was to remain in oblivion for the five hundred years that followed the massacre at Bangor. But then an incident occurred that ensured its revival and survival to the present day, even though that revival was itself to last only a matter of a further five hundred years or so. The incident, which occurred sometime in the 1130s, was the presentation of a certain book to a British (i.e. Welsh) monk by an archdeacon of Oxford. The monk's name was Geoffrey of Monmouth, the archdeacon was Walter of Oxford, and the book was a very ancient, possibly unique, copy of the recorded history of the early Britons, written in language so archaic that it needed to be translated quickly into Latin before either the book perished or the language was forgotten.

In which context, it is interesting to note what Professor Mackie has written concerning the language of the early Picts who had more than a passing influence on both the early and later history of the Irish: “The Picts certainly used a form of P-Celtic (the mother of Welsh, Cornish and Breton), with traces of Gaulish forms. However, it is clear, from the few scraps of evidence which survive, that the Picts also used another language, probably unrelated to any ‘Indo-European’ tongue and therefore so different from modern European languages as to be incomprehensible to us.

Our English tongue, which hath been the most harsh, uneven and broken language of the world, part Dutch, part Irish, Saxon, Scotch, Welsh, and indeed a gallimaufry of many, but perfect in none, is now, by this secondary means of playing, continually refined, every writer striving in himself to add a new flourish unto it; so that in process, from the most rude and unpolished tongue, it is grown to a most perfect and composed language

Inside, the tent was sectioned off by cloth walls. In the main area where they entered, there was a table with four chairs and an arming stand that held the knight’s chain mail, helm, and sword. “Ioan?” Christian called. No one answered. As they turned to leave, they were confronted by what appeared to be a young archer who was surely no older than the boy who had led them here. Several inches shorter than Adara, he was gangly and thin, with raven-black hair and brown eyes that watched them warily. He held his bow at the ready with an arrow already nocked. “Who are you and what business have you with Lord Ioan?” he asked in a gruff, low tone. “We are old friends,” Christian said calmly. Phantom moved toward him. The archer turned quickly and let fly the arrow. Phantom caught it midflight, but before he could take another step, the archer swung the bow and caught him upside his head with it. Phantom staggered back from the force of the blow. The archer struck again and knocked him to the ground. Christian moved toward them. Before Adara could blink, the archer had another arrow nocked and ready to fly into Christian’s chest. “Corryn, cease!” The Welsh-accented voice rang through the room like thunder. Adara looked at the entrance to see a tall, well-muscled man there who bore a striking resemblance to the archer. His wavy black hair fell to his shoulders and a full beard covered his cheeks. He looked wild and untamed as he put himself between the archer and Christian. “What has gotten into your head, Spider?” he asked the archer in his thick, rolling accent. “They came here looking for you,” the archer said brashly, as if the larger man’s anger didn’t concern him at all. He finally unnocked the arrow. “After the message from Stryder saying there were assassins out to kill you, I thought I was protecting you, brawd.” The man she assumed must be Ioan made a disgusted noise at him. “God save me from your protection. Did it never occur to you that an assassin wouldn’t bother to come into my tent and announce himself?” He said something in a language Adara didn’t understand, but by Corryn’s reaction, it must have been a curse or reprimand of some kind. “Now apologize. You almost took the head off the Abbot, and it’s the Phantom who you’ve knocked to the ground.” The archer’s face went pale at that. Ioan stepped away from the boy to offer his hand to Phantom, who took it. He helped him back up to his feet. “You’ll have to forgive my brother, Phantom. He’s a damned fool.” “Are you the Abbot?” Corryn asked Christian. “Aye.” The boy’s lips quivered before he threw himself into Christian’s arms. “May the saints guard your blessed soul throughout all eternity!” Christian looked awkward as he frowned at Ioan. “Brother?” Ioan’s gaze turned dark, dangerous as he pulled Corryn back. Still Corryn stared at Christian with hero worship. “Thank you, Abbot, for bringing my brother back to me.” “Get out of here, scamp,” Ioan said gruffly, “before I skin you.” Corryn curled his lip at Ioan. “I spoke too soon, Abbott. Curses to you, that you brought his surly hide home. Methinks you should have left him there to rot.” He turned to Phantom. “My apologies to you, sir. I hope you’ll forgive me.” Phantom shook the boy’s arm. “I admire anyone who can get the better of me. It doesn’t happen often.” “Corryn!” “I’m leaving,” he snapped. “To the devil with your hoary hide.” -Christian, Corryn, Ioan, & Phantom

The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it does involve an extra step, but even that isn't all that unusual. Welsh is like Shakespearean English on acid: the verb always - not just in questions - moves to the beginning. Alternatively, it can be viewed as taking the French grammar a step further. While the verb stops at tense in French, it moves further in Welsh to a position that traditional grammarians call the complementizer (don't ask).

He was afraid he might say or do something that would offend King Stephen or Bishop Henry and turn them against Kingsbridge. French-born people often mocked the way the English spoke their language: what would they think of a Welsh accent? In the monastic world, Philip had always been judged by his piety, obedience, and devotion to God’s work. Those things counted for nothing here, in the capital city of one of the greatest kingdoms in the world. Philip was out of his depth. He became oppressed by the feeling that he was some kind of impostor, a nobody pretending to be a somebody, and that he was sure to be found out in no time and sent home in disgrace. He

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6. Read them out loud. Now look away and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again. If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you're Chinese, though, you're almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6—right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds. That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene's book The Number Sense. As Dehaene explains: Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is "si" and 7 "qi"). Their English equivalents—"four," "seven"—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits. It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and five- teen. But we don't. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty and sixty, which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five and three and two, but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the "decade" first and the unit number second (twentyone, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two- tens-four and so on. That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don't reach forty until they're five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills. The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-yearold to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37+22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tensseven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens-nine. "The Asian system is transparent," says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist who has closely studied Asian-Western differences. "I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there's a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it's sensible. For fractions, we say three-fifths. The Chinese is literally 'out of five parts, take three.' That's telling you conceptually

Siarad Cymraeg?" said Old Shacob. "He wants to know if you speak Welsh," said the surveyor. "NO!" yelled the official at the old man before him. "Tamn it all; his language, man!" shouted Dan. "What you expect in Wales - Chinese, or what?!

And yet those who know the language say that he has said nothing that is extraordinary; that there has been little brilliancy of phrase; that he has talked simply and cheerfully of his own experience, and has asked those who are not Christians to give themselves to God. Certainly it has all been very quiet. There has been no loud rantings, nor spectacular displays, nor open appeals to the emotions. But what is happening?

Maybe food is a particularly strong language for immigrant children. To me, it symbolises a home I never even lived in. One foot firmly in the deep Welsh valleys where I was born, the other in the island of Hong Kong, a twelve hour flight away on the other side of the world, my second home.

The sign for Saussure consists of two elements: a signifier (signifiant) and a signified (signifié), both of which are arbitrary. The arbitrariness of the signifier is not a difficult concept to grasp. As a native speaker of English, when I see an animal barking I call it a dog, but there is no reason why it should be called a dog: if there were, all languages would have discovered this and given this animal the same name, rather than selecting such different terms as ci (Welsh), perro (Spanish), Hund (German) or mbwa (Swahili).

Avaon and many of his men decided to go home, but Kynan and another group stayed, and they determined to cut out the tongues of the women, lest their own British language be contaminated. Because the women were silent and the men could speak, the men of Brittany were called Bryttanyeid, and there have often come and still do come men of that language from Brittany. (Commentary: Conan and his brother Afaon immediately become Maxen's loyal associates, later helping him reclaim the throne of Rome. For this service the grateful Macsen gives Conan dispensation to lead his army to conquer whatever realm he wants. Conan chooses Armorica, where he kills all the men and replaces them with his own soldiers. He then orders the tongues of all the women cut out, lest their speech corrupt that of the Britons; a fanciful etymology connects this event with Welsh name of Brittany, Llydaw, supposedly from the Welsh lled-taw or "half-silent". The Conan story became a dominant founding myth for the Bretons for hundreds of years.)

The nation-state furnished an ideology of national identity that made it easier to rally people for military adventures that their rulers considered profitable. The “common language and culture” of each of these new entities was in no way a natural human community like early tribes and bands. Rather, they were created by brutal conquest such as that of the British over the Irish, Scots, and the Welsh, or the Castilian Spaniards’ conquest of the Basques and the Catalans.

You hair looks verily like spun gold," he said, and then laughed. "I sound like every smitten lover since the world was green. Why must the language of love be so threadbare? There ought to be a way to tell you how I feel without evoking so many echoes, so many ghosts.

The western seaboard was, in part, settled by migrants from Iberia and south-western France and they often came by sea. There is a clear set of staging posts marked by a shared lexicon. Celtic languages were once spoken in Spain and are still whispered in Galicia, Breton clings on in Brittany, Cornish is being revived, Welsh thrives, Manx survives, Irish is constitutionally enshrined and Scots Gaelic hangs on, just.

This [Welsh] language seems to be more particularly adapted for poetry; which, however extraordinary it may seem to some, on account of the multiplicity of gutturals and consonants with which it abounds, has the softness and harmony of the Italian, with the majesty and expression of the Greek.

The first people in Britain were nomadic hunters, food gatherers, who were followed in around 3500 BC by settlers who first cultivated land and raised crops. These people were of Celtic stock and spoke a Celtic language, the distant ancestor of today’s Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

Noteworthy language revitalization success stories include Catalan, suppressed for decades under Franco in Spain, but now a first language for most Catalans (almost all of whom also speak Spanish), and enjoying co-official status with the national language in Catalonia, and Welsh, which has stabilized after years of decline.

In Wales they were specifically trained in the old tongue and were primarily members of the bardic orders. Their task was to memorise countless tales, prose, poetry, and songs, and to retain this information and knowledge and then transmit it via the narrative tradition to the people. They were simultaneously servants of society, tradition, the gods, and the spirit of culture and heritage. Within the Welsh language another meaning for the word bard is daroganwr, meaning “prophet,” and it is true that much of the old poetry of the Celtic bards contains prophecies, some of which have been realised and others which speak of things yet to come.

Greek dúō, Vedic dvá(u), Latin duo, Welsh dau, Old Church Slavonic dŭva, and so on. Banks’s chart is similarly persuasive: two is given as rua in Tahitian, loua in the language of the Cocos Islands, roa in New Guinea, rove in Madagascar. Seven is hetu in Tahitian, fitou in the Cocos, fita in New Guinea, fruto in Madagascar. Even allowing for errors, the overall effect is to suggest strongly that the languages in Banks’s set are related.

In the field of suppressed languages there are many now that attract more attention ... Basque ... Breton ... Romany.... They all sign up for those.... Not that they study the language: nobody wants to do that these days.... They want problems to debate, general ideas to connect with other general ideas. My colleagues adjust, follow the mainstream, give their courses titles like ‘Sociology of Welsh,’ 'Psycho-linguistics of Provençal.”...

Cambridge didn’t know it existed and, if it had known, it wouldn’t have known how to talk about it because it had no language for it. How could it? Cambridge is addicted to notions of culture which depend upon that which is written down in books, and the Welsh valleys have no books. They have an oral culture; they have a traditional culture;