Ben@Forest wrote: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.
The Wiki article on Middle Welsh (12th-14th C) says
"Middle Welsh is reasonably intelligible, albeit with some work, to a modern-day Welsh speaker"...."The orthography of Middle Welsh was not standardized, and there is great variation between manuscripts in how certain sounds are spelled."
Let's compare that to the opening of the Booke of the tales of Caunterbury:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Well if you look past the non-standardized orthography (spelling), it's reasonably intelligible, albeit with some work, to a modern-day English speaker. The only word that would fix someone willing to do the some work, would be soote, which I used to think was sweet, but iirc actually when I actually looked into it is some lost word meaning sharp or something. (No, I didn't study English literature any longer than I was forced to; later in life I was sufficiently interested to have a quick look at it.) 1 difficult word in 4 lines of poetry, not a bad rate for "reasonably intelligible". Yes I know there are harder bits, though reading on in the prologue one tricky word every 4 lines is about the rate of it.
Germans have no problems of communication talking to each other in German. The very long words in German correspond to equivalent long phrases in English, where all the lexical elements are present and not stuck together.
You say German lacks the ability to generate new words for things and thus borrows them. Well what did English do? It's one of the biggest word-borrowers on the planet. It's stuffed full of French and Latin words borrowed in mediaeval times. English borrowed "pork" from French and used it to say "pigmeat" more economically, but what's wrong with saying "pigmeat", or "schweinfleisch" as they do in German. In fact the latter is easier as you don't have to learn as many different words, all you need to know is pig and meat, not a third special word for the pigmeat. More recently we've borrowed all sorts of words brought back from our ex-Empire, like pyjamas and jodhpurs and bungalows, and all sorts of surprising stuff you never even noticed was borrowed its been so well integrated. Television was invented from a greek bit and a latin bit, whereas in German they say fernseher, far-seer, which is much less snooty and easier to get way of saying the same thing. Someone at some point had to invent a word for television because it didn't exist before: in German they just did the natural thing, whereas in English someone went to the trouble of popularising a curious word only highly educated people would get the implications of. Fahrrad, drive-wheel, for bicycle likewise.
I've never lived in Wales, spent only brief holidays there, have no desire to learn to speak Welsh, I'm just alert to my surroundings and interested to understand it. Thus when I popped up in the Argentinean town of Trevelín and realised I was in a Welsh-origin town, I immediately spotted I was in Milltown, which would be trefelin in the Welsh orthography, because I've picked up the Welsh vocabulary of common place name elements because they are all around you in Wales, and often a translation is available immediately adjacent. It is a question of whether you look at what is around you and take an interest in it, are sympathetic to it, or close your eyes to it.