Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Commuting, Day rides, Audax, Incidents, etc.
kwackers
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by kwackers »

karlt wrote:I'd suggest that in Wales Welsh is going to be more useful than Russian.

I'm not sure that's actually true...

If you're in Wales I doubt you'll find anyone that can only speak Welsh (and not English), so in that respect the ability to speak Welsh isn't actually useful - more a nicety.

OTOH, if you need Russian then you need Russian. I'm going to have a stab in the dark here but I think I'd be prepared to put money on it that there are more people in Wales that speak Russian and no English than there are that speak Welsh and no English.

(Sticking my neck out a bit, but tourists, business folk etc etc :wink: )
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661-Pete
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by 661-Pete »

Ben@Forest wrote: Yes, sir, once the German language gets hold of a cat, it's goodbye cat. That's about the amount of it.
Even more bizarre are the odd genders assigned to some words. I was definitely perplexed, why on earth the neuter das Mädchen, das Fräulein, das Kind? I believe there's a good reason, but still.... :roll:
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).
kwackers
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by kwackers »

661-Pete wrote:Even more bizarre are the odd genders assigned to some words. I was definitely perplexed, why on earth the neuter das Mädchen, das Fräulein, das Kind? I believe there's a good reason, but still.... :roll:

As an ignoranus it's the thing that confuses me about most foreign languages. Why not just junk gender. Make everything neuter in German and in other languages throw a dice and pick either male or female (it seems pretty random anyway).
Result: Something that's much easier to learn...
Bicycler
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by Bicycler »

kwackers wrote:
karlt wrote:I'd suggest that in Wales Welsh is going to be more useful than Russian.

I'm not sure that's actually true...

If you're in Wales I doubt you'll find anyone that can only speak Welsh (and not English), so in that respect the ability to speak Welsh isn't actually useful - more a nicety.

OTOH, if you need Russian then you need Russian. I'm going to have a stab in the dark here but I think I'd be prepared to put money on it that there are more people in Wales that speak Russian and no English than there are that speak Welsh and no English.

Hmmm, true enough but I'll wager that there are more jobs which require a working knowledge of Welsh. The 'nicety' of speaking welsh may also be a great advantage socially if you live in a welsh speaking area. Just not all that much use if your job didn't require it and you didn't live in a welsh speaking area.
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661-Pete
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by 661-Pete »

I have to confess, like many other English folk, most of my experience of Welsh, Gaelic or Irish words comes from place names. And they certainly lead to immense pronunciation problems for us. Like many cyclists, I've heard of the fabled Bealach na Bà - but I'd be flummoxed as to how to pronounce it! :oops:
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).
karlt
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by karlt »

meic wrote:
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.


Dw i'n ceisio, Meic, dw i'n ceisio.
karlt
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by karlt »

661-Pete wrote:I have to confess, like many other English folk, most of my experience of Welsh, Gaelic or Irish words comes from place names. And they certainly lead to immense pronunciation problems for us. Like many cyclists, I've heard of the fabled Bealach na Bà - but I'd be flummoxed as to how to pronounce it! :oops:


Gaelic pronunciation is a bit of a dark art, especially since it hasn't had the spelling reform Irish has. Welsh gives you no excuse; it's almost entirely phonetic and ddy rwls cwd bi lyrnt in an afftyrnwn.
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feefee8
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by feefee8 »

Byalluch nuh ba would do...
iviehoff
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by iviehoff »

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.
iviehoff
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by iviehoff »

661-Pete wrote:
Ben@Forest wrote: Yes, sir, once the German language gets hold of a cat, it's goodbye cat. That's about the amount of it.
Even more bizarre are the odd genders assigned to some words. I was definitely perplexed, why on earth the neuter das Mädchen, das Fräulein, das Kind? I believe there's a good reason, but still.... :roll:

It is because gender is not actually sexual in origin, rather it has its origin in different classes of noun with different sets of endings. To the extent that you could specify that something was a woman-thing with an ending that put it in a different noun-classes, that is how the identification of grammatical gender masculine and feminine arose. But there are other languages with gender that doesn't cover masc and fem, one near at hand is Swedish, where the genders are common and neuter, and most people-things are common gender. There are languages that don't have separate words for he and she. I think there's an African language with edible and inedible genders.
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661-Pete
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by 661-Pete »

Curiously, I remember quite the opposite when I did Latin at school. There the gender was usually tied to the declension, so for example first declension** words were nearly all feminine. But if the word referred to an obvious male, like nauta (sailor) or agricola (farmer)*, then it took the masculine gender.

*I suppose that farmers and sailors were always men back in Roman times...

**mensa mensa mensam mensae mensae mensa mensae mensae mensas mensarum mensis mensis.... don't get me started!
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 »

Dare I suggest that we're a bit off-topic :roll: ?
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).
thirdcrank
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Re: Not your usual "Cyclists Dismount" sign!

Post by thirdcrank »

This discussion shows why the different versions of English have been so successful: widespread use by people who were not very good at it has led to the scrapping of much of the declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs and so on. While the irregular forms of common words can quickly trap and identify the non-native speakers, it's very easy to get by with a limited vocabulary. I know I'm using a bit of a circular argument - widespread use has led to widespread use - but it's still valid. Watch a report of a catastrophe from just about any part of the world and quite ordinary local people will be able - often with great dignity - to cobble together a few words of English which convey the message. The compilers of dictionaries are seen by some as the final arbiter, but in reality, they have the final word on little more than the eligibility of a word for Scrabble or in Countdown. Usage rules, OK?
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