Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

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karlt
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by karlt »

Having two languages is common through the world. Swiss German speakers can also generally speak standard High German. It's called Diglossia. The Welsh situation is somewhat unusual in that the two languages are only distantly related, but the same principle applies. The fact that 1st Language (L1) Welsh speakers also speak English is neither here nor there; English is a second language, needed for some official use and to access a wider range of entertainment,information and literature, but a second language it remains. It doesn't seem that much of a stretch to consider being conversant in Welsh as a part of a rounded education in Wales, allowing the person so educated to access the considerable proportion of Welsh culture that uses the Welsh language, as well as opening and explaining the typonomy of the country. It may not be a language that folk in Newport are going down to the pub, but familiarity with it does give the aforementioned cultural benefits. One may not wish to make use of those benefits, but we don't accept that as an excuse for excising Shakespeare from the curriculum either. We would hardly, I'm sure, consider French an imposition on the curriculum in England if a fifth of Englishmen had French as a first language; it'd be a no-brainer.

Personally I think there's a strong case for having a term or two of Welsh and Gaelic in schools in England; it might reduce the animosity a bit and perhaps put a lid on all the crap that's spoken about Welsh being an obscure, strange and unpronounceable language. It isn't; having learnt some of both Welsh and French I'd say that for the English speaker Welsh has fewer challenging sounds than French; it also has only one conjugation of verbs with only three inflected tenses and only a handful of irregular verbs.
Bicycler
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by Bicycler »

I do wish to point out that I wasn't stating an opinion on the curriculum of welsh schools, the Welsh language or Welsh speakers. I was challenging the assertion that English speaking residents of Wales who don't learn Welsh are arrogant
Mike Sales
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by Mike Sales »

I used to know a trilingual boy. He spoke Portugese with his mother, English with his father and Welsh at school. He has done very well in life.
It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the rich what gets the pleasure
Isn't it a blooming shame?
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661-Pete
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by 661-Pete »

karlt wrote: having learnt some of both Welsh and French I'd say that for the English speaker Welsh has fewer challenging sounds than French; it also has only one conjugation of verbs with only three inflected tenses and only a handful of irregular verbs.

I wouldn't agree that a simpler grammatical structure is enough to make a language 'easy'. In fact it would be a bold person who asserted that any language is easy for any particular person not brought up to it. I've been told that Spanish is easy to learn, but despite some years of study and a reasonable grasp of the language basics, I still can't follow Spanish dialogue on TV. Dutch is said to be the closest language to English, syntactically, but it's notoriously hard for an English speaker to pronounce correctly (as a Dutch friend has pointed out to me). And few English people are fluent in Dutch, probably because it isn't taught in most schools.

Incidentally, if you've ever despaired over all those genders, le and la in French, der, die, das, etc. in German ... try Hungarian. It doesn't have any genders. Doesn't make it easy! (My mother was Hungarian, so I know all about it. I only ever learnt a few words like Yes and No...)
Suppose that this room is a lift. The support breaks and down we go with ever-increasing velocity.
Let us pass the time by performing physical experiments...
--- Arthur Eddington (creator of the Eddington Number).
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661-Pete
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by 661-Pete »

Mike Sales wrote:I used to know a trilingual boy. He spoke Portugese with his mother, English with his father and Welsh at school. He has done very well in life.

He didn't grow up to be the Emperor Charles V, by any chance? :lol:
Suppose that this room is a lift. The support breaks and down we go with ever-increasing velocity.
Let us pass the time by performing physical experiments...
--- Arthur Eddington (creator of the Eddington Number).
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meic
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by meic »

I only ever learnt a few words like Yes and No...)


Try that in Welsh. :wink: :lol:
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Ben@Forest
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by Ben@Forest »

iviehoff wrote:
Ben@Forest wrote:Welsh is not a particularly good living language. I remember hearing a Welsh speaker say how wonderful it was that they were still using a language that hadn't changed since the 13th century - which sounds great until you realise it would mean in English we'd all be going around talking like the characters in the Canterbury Tales. And in the 13th century dismounting a bike was not a big talking point for Welsh speakers - but it does make you wonder how they ever described getting off a horse.

This is nonsense. The language has continued to be used as vernacular, and languages used as vernacular always assimilate the change necessary to make them adequate to the situation. If you have ever seen bilingual signs in English and German, you will realise that sometimes some languages seem to take a lot of time to say certain common things, but this doesn't make them "not very good" languages. Welsh has even quite noticeably changed since the 1960s edition of Teach Yourself Welsh I once owned, if you compare that with a modern tutor. Similar claims about Icelandic being just like it was 800 years ago are sometimes made, but not by anyone who has ever compared the original texts of Icelandic sagas with translations into modern Icelandic. Icelandic has retained certain grammatical features of old Norse that continental Scandinavian languages have lost, thus making it easier for Icelandic people to pick up the grammar of Old Norse, but it doesn't mean that Old Norse at all mutually comprehensible with modern Icelandic, or that Icelandic is in any sense a language in which it is "difficult" to express modern ideas. Likewise Welsh people who do have indeed read mediaeval Welsh/Icelandic know that it is about as difficult as Chaucer to read for an Englishman.


I'm happy to stand corrected but I did hear the '13th century' comment from someone who should therefore have known better. I was in a Welsh youth hostel and there was a party of kids there who were being encouraged to speak Welsh by their teacher or instructor (though this evidently didn't come naturally or easily to many/all of them). I was earwigging as you often do when in such situations so heard the 13th century claim (she was going on about poetry in Welsh).

However I would to some extent stand by the comment that Welsh is not a 'good' living language. I speak good German (having lived in Germany) and would say the same about German, it is nowhere near as flexible as English as it often lacks the ability to add or develop new words (its long compound words are hilarious - try Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. And unlike English the German language 'authorities' suffer a great deal of angst about how many English words are added to German dictionaries every year (see what I did there?). Frankly if Welsh was a really good living language it wouldn't have declined so much in the first place.
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661-Pete
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by 661-Pete »

meic wrote:
I only ever learnt a few words like Yes and No...)


Try that in Welsh. :wink: :lol:

This is a trick question, is it not? (or am I thinking of Irish? I read somewhere that there are no words for 'yes' and 'no' in Irish...)
I've always found the Greek words for yes (ναί) and no (όχι) bewildering.
Incidentally, the Hungarian are Igen and Nem.
Suppose that this room is a lift. The support breaks and down we go with ever-increasing velocity.
Let us pass the time by performing physical experiments...
--- Arthur Eddington (creator of the Eddington Number).
Postboxer
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by Postboxer »

Mrs PB moved to Wales in her youth, around the age of 12-13 I think, as she was a beginner at Welsh, she was put in the bottom class for Welsh AND English! Despite her being one of the brightest in her year. Seems silly forcing people to learn Welsh if they don't want to, better to force them to learn a useful language they don't want to and with a lot more speakers, Chinese or Russian for example.

Although I'm always tempted to learn Welsh, just because Welsh speakers will never suspect I know what they're saying about me.
karlt
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by karlt »

661-Pete wrote:
meic wrote:
I only ever learnt a few words like Yes and No...)


Try that in Welsh. :wink: :lol:

This is a trick question, is it not? (or am I thinking of Irish? I read somewhere that there are no words for 'yes' and 'no' in Irish...)
I've always found the Greek words for yes (ναί) and no (όχι) bewildering.
Incidentally, the Hungarian are Igen and Nem.


Strictly speaking there are simple words for yes and no in Welsh. They're 'ie' and 'nage'

It's just that you can only use them to answer particular kinds of questions - ones that don't start with a verb. Since most questions do, you have to answer using that verb in the negative or positive. Normally this is some part of 'bod' - 'to be', but not necessarily.
karlt
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by karlt »

Postboxer wrote:Mrs PB moved to Wales in her youth, around the age of 12-13 I think, as she was a beginner at Welsh, she was put in the bottom class for Welsh AND English! Despite her being one of the brightest in her year. Seems silly forcing people to learn Welsh if they don't want to, better to force them to learn a useful language they don't want to and with a lot more speakers, Chinese or Russian for example.

Although I'm always tempted to learn Welsh, just because Welsh speakers will never suspect I know what they're saying about me.


I'd suggest that in Wales Welsh is going to be more useful than Russian.
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meic
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by meic »

Postboxer wrote:Mrs PB moved to Wales in her youth, around the age of 12-13 I think, as she was a beginner at Welsh, she was put in the bottom class for Welsh AND English! Despite her being one of the brightest in her year. Seems silly forcing people to learn Welsh if they don't want to, better to force them to learn a useful language they don't want to and with a lot more speakers, Chinese or Russian for example.

Although I'm always tempted to learn Welsh, just because Welsh speakers will never suspect I know what they're saying about me.


Nothing would please us more but it will not cure your paranoia. Or is it vanity? does anybody think we honestly have nothing better to talk about? :lol:

Sure, if we wanted to say something and not be understood we could switch to Welsh and I must admit I rather enjoy doing that in Germany just to see the confusion on their faces when they think it is their English knowledge which is fading.

Do you notice the dilemma that above posts present to us?
If we change to your language when you are present you then go and post things like "I have been to Wales and nobody speaks Welsh there, there is no need to teach it in schools" and if we keep on talking in Welsh "The rude bleeps kept talking to each other in Welsh and we didnt know what they were talking about and it made us very paranoid".

Nothing would make us happier than for somebody to make the effort to join in.
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meic
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by meic »

However I would to some extent stand by the comment that Welsh is not a 'good' living language. I speak good German (having lived in Germany) and would say the same about German, it is nowhere near as flexible as English as it often lacks the ability to add or develop new words (its long compound words are hilarious - try Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. And unlike English the German language 'authorities' suffer a great deal of angst about how many English words are added to German dictionaries every year (see what I did there?). Frankly if Welsh was a really good living language it wouldn't have declined so much in the first place.


Do you think there might be an itsy-bitsy bit of bias there? :lol:

As for the rise and fall of languages that is more about military prowess than linguistic prowess, think of that most frequent of English expressions "If it wasnt for [insert item of choice] we would all be speaking German now." :wink:
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thirdcrank
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by thirdcrank »

meic wrote: ... As for the rise and fall of languages that is more about military prowess than linguistic prowess, think of that most frequent of English expressions "If it wasnt for [insert item of choice] we would all be speaking German now." :wink:


I used that expression once on the forum - about the United States - but I didn't realise it was widespread. Military conquest is only one of various reasons why people learn other languages, either formally or informally. eg I pride myself on an excellent knowledge of road sign Welsh (although apart from swyddfa the "out of the office" sign had me beat. In my defence I'll say it's not a phrase often seen on road signs. :lol: ) I don't need it anymore, BTW, because I don't go where I feel unwelcome.

Afaik, the strongest motivator in learning other languages voluntarily is the economic one. eg it's not easy to earn a living in a country where you can't speak the lingo. The economic benefits can also be artificial, as when official attempts are made to promote a language.
Ben@Forest
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by Ben@Forest »

meic wrote:
As for the rise and fall of languages that is more about military prowess than linguistic prowess, think of that most frequent of English expressions "If it wasnt for [insert item of choice] we would all be speaking German now." :wink:


Not so sure - when Wales was (finally) conquered by England those who were ruling England spoke Norman French - not English. And of course England itself was conquered by the same bunch, but the kings ended up speaking English, not the other way round. Part of the reason English has dominated is that it is easy to speak English badly and still be understood, that is not the case with German (and perhaps Welsh?). There are loads of Mark Twain quotes about trying to speak German here is just one:

A dog is "der Hund"; a woman is "die Frau"; a horse is "das Pferd"; now you put that dog in the genitive case, and is he the same dog he was before? No, sir; he is "des Hundes"; put him in the dative case and what is he? Why, he is "dem Hund." Now you snatch him into the accusative case and how is it with him? Why, he is "den Hunden." But suppose he happens to be twins and you have to pluralize him- what then? Why, they'll swat that twin dog around through the 4 cases until he'll think he's an entire international dog-show all in is own person. I don't like dogs, but I wouldn't treat a dog like that- I wouldn't even treat a borrowed dog that way. Well, it's just the same with a cat. They start her in at the nominative singular in good health and fair to look upon, and they sweat her through all the 4 cases and the 16 the's and when she limps out through the accusative plural you wouldn't recognize her for the same being. Yes, sir, once the German language gets hold of a cat, it's goodbye cat. That's about the amount of it.
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