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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: The Language of Heaven
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I don't know whether there's been a Heaven thread on this before now. But here's a chance to lilt forth about Welsh language issues for those who speak it, those who don't and those who're interested.
To get things started ... Welsh is often said to be the oldest language in Europe - although I suspect Basque might be much, much older.
It's often said to have the longest literary tradition outside of the Greek and Latin corpus/es.
Anyone like to start us off with thoughts on either of those?
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713
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Posted
I ought to at least try to clarify my post that got Mousethief's ire in a Warmer Place. It wasn't clear so I'm not surprised. Mea culpa.
My understanding is that Welsh was kicking around for ages and had produced a fair body of literature before anyone considered writing it down. By the time they did the latin alphabet was pretty much the standard thing in Europe so Welsh had to be written using that alphabet.
It could have been worse. Maltese is a semitic language akin to Arabic (and is easily understood by speakers of Arabic) but that too is written in the latin alphabet. IIRC that only became commonplace in the 18th century.
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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"
(Paul Sinha, BBC)
Posts: 24276 | From: Newport, Wales | Registered: Apr 2004
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L'organist
Shipmate
# 17338
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Posted
Perhaps England's best-educated monarch, Elizabeth I, was a noted linguist, being fluent in Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish plus the English. What is less well known is that she could also speak some Welsh, having been taught by Blanche Parry, Chief Gentlewoman of her Privy Chamber.
That Elizabeth was close to Blanche is evidenced by the fact that when Blanche died Elizabeth paid all the funeral expenses, and for the fine memorial to her which can be see in St Margaret's Church, Westminster (next to Westminster Abbey).
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Rara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quae velis et quae sentias dicere licet
Posts: 4950 | From: somewhere in England... | Registered: Sep 2012
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andras
Shipmate
# 2065
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Posted
Certainly the earliest written Welsh is much closer to the modern language than, say, Chaucer is to modern English.
And I suspect that if we could hear pre-Roman Welsh, a willing listener would be able to get the gist of it pretty quickly.
So yes, it's old!
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God's on holiday.
(Why borrow a cat?)
Adrian Plass
Posts: 544 | From: Tregaron | Registered: Dec 2001
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Welsh is written down as it is pronounced. It's phonetic.
Phonetic means that the written symbols represent sounds. English is phonetic, just not consistent.
I do not know Welsh, but what little I've read suggests that it is more consistent than English.
(Code fix)
[ 29. June 2016, 16:34: Message edited by: Firenze ]
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757
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Posted
The problem of talking about the age of a language is that the idea of a 'starting point' is a bit artificial, e.g. Spanish seems to be much younger than Basque, but only because beyond a certain point in history Spanish-speakers are called Latin-speakers. OTOH, it is certainly true that people were speaking a Basque-type language in Europe long before they were speaking any Indo-European language, all of which were brought in by bloody immigrants ...
Regarding Welsh spelling, it is broadly consistent, and once you get past the strangeness of using W as a vowel and doubling up consonants to change their sound (e.g. DD as a voiced 'th' sound), it uses the Latin alphabet in a way that is broadly consistent with most European languages. English and French are the chief outliers when it comes to strange uses of the Latin alphabet.
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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)
Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004
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Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by andras:
And I suspect that if we could hear pre-Roman Welsh, a willing listener would be able to get the gist of it pretty quickly.
How easy is it for Welsh speakers to get the gist of Breton?
Posts: 5026 | From: USA | Registered: Feb 2013
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
I ought to at least try to clarify my post that got Mousethief's ire in a Warmer Place. It wasn't clear so I'm not surprised. Mea culpa.
You have a strange definition of "ire".
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Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
English and French are the chief outliers when it comes to strange uses of the Latin alphabet.
Irish gaelic? Vietnamese?
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
'Welsh is the language of Heaven - it takes all eternity to learn it'.
I am distrustful of the idea of an ur-language: it seems to me as likely as a stationary river.
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
'Welsh is the language of Heaven - it takes all eternity to learn it'.
I am distrustful of the idea of an ur-language: it seems to me as likely as a stationary river.
You mean, like a canal?
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
Yeah, canals never move.
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
How easy is it for Welsh speakers to get the gist of Breton?
Breton is closest to Cornish, apparently. I tried learning Cornish a long time ago and found a knowledge of Irish helpful; and an Irish friend had a holiday in Brittany and found she understood, or got the gist of Breton through knowing Irish. I can only say Irish was no use to me in trying to learn Welsh; the two languages have diverged too much.
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
I am distrustful of the idea of an ur-language:
It is silly. Given that language is a progressive and adaptive thing and the earliest bits would not have survived to any system existing now due to time, migration and intertwining culture.
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
I can only say Irish was no use to me in trying to learn Welsh; the two languages have diverged too much.
Isn't one p-celtic and the other q-celtic?
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
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HCH
Shipmate
# 14313
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Posted
As I understand it, two of the languages that change least over time are Greek (though the vowels did change some) and Icelandic (said to be the most conservative of all).
One could, of course, ask what programming language is dominant in heaven.
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
As I understand it, two of the languages that change least over time are Greek
As a young undergraduate I naively asked my tutor if learning modern Greek would help me understand ancient Greek because it was easier. He replied that modern Greek is a rather different kettle of fish to ancient Greek, involving Turkish loanwords and a whole bunch of other things.
Spanish hasn't changed much by comparison with other European languages. A Spaniard can pick up a text written centuries ago and read it. Hebrew, obviously, can still be read, though modern Hebrew isn't Biblical Hebrew; and if you can read Chinese characters you can still read poetry written centuries ago.
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St. Gwladys
Shipmate
# 14504
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Posted
As I remember, there are two strands to the Celtic languages, Goedelic and Brythonic. I can't remember which languages fall into which strand, but when we were on holiday in Brittany some years ago, we could recognise some elements of place names. We are currently on holiday in Cornwall, and the same is true.
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by andras:
Certainly the earliest written Welsh is much closer to the modern language than, say, Chaucer is to modern English.
And I suspect that if we could hear pre-Roman Welsh, a willing listener would be able to get the gist of it pretty quickly.
So yes, it's old!
No. Pre-Roman Brythonic would be almost the same as Gaulish, but the changes between that and Welsh are absolutely massive. A Latin speaker would have a better chance than a modern Welsh speaker, unless you for example fund 'uindos' is obviously a form of 'gwynt'.
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
'Welsh is the language of Heaven - it takes all eternity to learn it'.
I am distrustful of the idea of an ur-language: it seems to me as likely as a stationary river.
You mean, like a canal?
While both are bodies of water longer than they are wide, there the resemblance ends. They differ in origin, duration, morphology and behaviour. You cannot say one is an example of the other, any more than you can say a banana is a kind of apple.
Language. The foundation of pedantry. Yessssss!
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Callan
Shipmate
# 525
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Posted
Originally posted by Ricardus:
quote:
The problem of talking about the age of a language is that the idea of a 'starting point' is a bit artificial, e.g. Spanish seems to be much younger than Basque, but only because beyond a certain point in history Spanish-speakers are called Latin-speakers.
That is entirely true. Which said, however, Spanish students don't study Seneca along with Cervantes but if you studied Greek it opens the door to Plato and Kazantakis.
I suppose languages are a bit like organisms. Birds find their origins in dinosaurs. Tuataras are much unchanged since that era. There is an unbroken period of descent but in some instances sufficient change that we acknowledge something new and in other cases we recognise continuity. And, of course, neither outcome is right or wrong.
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How easy it would be to live in England, if only one did not love her. - G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 9757 | From: Citizen of the World | Registered: Jun 2001
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Garasu
Shipmate
# 17152
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Posted
Cladistics is the relevant discipline, I think...
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"Could I believe in the doctrine without believing in the deity?". - Modesitt, L. E., Jr., 1943- Imager.
Posts: 889 | From: Surrey Heath (England) | Registered: Jun 2012
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
How easy is it for Welsh speakers to get the gist of Breton?
Breton is closest to Cornish, apparently. I tried learning Cornish a long time ago and found a knowledge of Irish helpful; and an Irish friend had a holiday in Brittany and found she understood, or got the gist of Breton through knowing Irish.
I find this vanishingly unlikely. For example, the word for "white" in the Brythonic languages (Welsh, Breton, Cornish) is Gwyn. The Irish is Fionn. They are actually cognates; proto-Celtic W- became Gw- or G- in Brythonic but F- in Goidelec (Irish, Manx, Gaelic). And that's only one example; Proto-Celtic S- became H- in Brythonic but remained S- in Goidelic, as another. To be honest, you have to be quite a philologist to spot the relationship between the two branches. It's a bit like trying to get the gist of the dialect that Gamaliel posted in in Hell from knowing Yiddish.
quote:
I can only say Irish was no use to me in trying to learn Welsh; the two languages have diverged too much.
Indeed. They probably lost mutual intelligibility during the Roman period, which actually puts them further apart than Wenglish and Yiddish. The only help Irish would be would be familiarity with a few oddities common to the Celtic languages, like VSO order (in Welsh anyway; less so in Cornish and Breton), conjugated prepositions (although the inflections are completely different) and initial consonant mutations (although they, again, have little commonality - lenition of feminine singular nouns after the definite article is the only one that comes to mind).
[ 30. June 2016, 08:51: Message edited by: Karl: Liberal Backslider ]
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
Welsh, Cornish and Breton are all Brythonic languages.
Scots and Irish Gaelic are Goidelic languages.
I don't speak Welsh, although I understand most place-names and do pronounce Welsh words properly (by and large) when I see them written down.
However, my understanding is that Welsh and Cornish are closer to one another than Welsh and Breton are - but there's certainly mutual comprehension there. On holiday in Britanny I've recognised and been able to transliterate (?) place names but it looks more similar to Cornish than it does to Welsh.
Kelly's Cornish Icecream ad is the first British TV ad in Cornish - but it's pretty macaronic as you can see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFz-U2gSmGg
I'd be interested if Welsh speakers (proper Welsh speakers that is, not people like me who only know snatches) can understand the actual Cornish parts of the ad?
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
Rough rule of thumb:
Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic speakers can understand one another.
They can't understand Welsh, Cornish and Breton but recognise some sounds and some words.
The Brythonic languages are about as close to the Gaelic ones as English is to German ie there are some similarities but they are no mutually comprehensible.
As far as I know, Welsh and Cornish speakers can understand each other pretty much perfectly, but Welsh and Breton are further apart. Cornish speakers can understand both Welsh and Breton.
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
I find this vanishingly unlikely.
Then I suggest you ask her yourself. It was a completely unprompted remark and she isn't the sort to make claims for the sake of it.
For my part there were words in Cornish that looked similar and that I recognized from Irish. It was not a completely unfamiliar language. I'm well used to reading and linking foreign-language words that have variant spellings, stresses, pronunciations etc. It's one of the things that goes with growing up in multi-lingual environments.
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I don't doubt that someone who speaks Gaelic would recognise certain words and phrases in Breton (or Welsh or Cornish too, for that matter) - but it would be rather like an English speaker being able to pick out similarities and resonances between English and Dutch or English and German.
It wouldn't be a case of complete mutual comprehensibility - far from it. More a case of a mixture of picking up on linguistic patterns combined with inspired guesswork.
I've been able to follow conversations in Germany and Spain that way, despite not being able to speak either language competently but only with a smattering of school-boy French, German and some later entry-level study of Spanish.
When I try to speak French or Spanish (I don't speak German but can understand some of it) it all comes out jumbled up - Franish or Sprench.
My daughter worked in Italy for a while. I'd try to join in conversations using a mix of Franish, Sprench and English. The result ... hilarity.
I know some Italian phrases but pronounce them in a Spanish way.
So now you understand ... ![[Biased]](wink.gif)
On the Wenglish thing ... it's a dialect form of English really, or Welsh-English with some Welsh loan-phrases, grammatical forms and bastardised words. It's English with a Welsh accent but then some ...
A Welsh accent on steroids if you like, but nothing like proper Welsh.
If anything, it's pretty close to West country English (Gloucestershire, Bristol, Somerset) in South Wales and close to Scouse (Liverpool) and aspects of Cheshire-dialect (yes, there is one) in the North.
There are interesting cross-overs along the line of Offa's Dyke.
There are some Welsh loan words and expressions in the Forest of Dean and parts of Shropshire. Heck, some bastardised-Welsh / Brythonic features still exist in agricultural slang as far east as Derbyshire. The way they used to count sheep, for instance ...
It's unclear whether these are based on survivals of Brythonic language in those districts or whether they were picked up from Welsh drovers who used to herd cattle to markets in England.
Heck, not only did the Welsh drive cattle to Smithfield in London but they used to walk geese there too - they used to fit them with special 'shoes' and they'd slowly waddle all the way to the capital!
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Rough rule of thumb:
Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic speakers can understand one another.
They can't understand Welsh, Cornish and Breton but recognise some sounds and some words.
The Brythonic languages are about as close to the Gaelic ones as English is to German ie there are some similarities but they are no mutually comprehensible.
As far as I know, Welsh and Cornish speakers can understand each other pretty much perfectly, but Welsh and Breton are further apart. Cornish speakers can understand both Welsh and Breton.
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
I've heard plenty of second hand claims, but I've also heard it straight from speakers themselves that there is no mutual comprehensibility. I'm not entirely surprised; I can read Welsh quite well but even knowing the orthography of Breton I can make very little of it - the occasional place name element, the odd word. You have to be careful even there though - Gwin coch is red wine in Welsh, but the homophonic Gwin coc'h in Breton would mean "shit wine". Cornish I can make some sense of but only because I've studied it qua Cornish; I know which sounds in Welsh correspond with which in Cornish, but even then, there are plenty of Cornish words with no commonly used Welsh cognate - Dybry 'to eat' (cf. W. Bywta); I don't think you'd really get far in one with knowledge only of the other - think English and Dutch.
I'd say that Goidelic and Brythonic are further apart than English and German - they've had nearly two thousand years of seperate development, rather than our 1500 years or so. and both underwent massive restructuring in the sixth-seventh centuries independently of each other; Proto-Celtic was a highly inflected language with noun cases and declensions; Welsh (defined as Old Welsh onwards, what we have written records of) has never had these; indeed the loss of final syllables (and with them case endings) is cited by many linguists as being the point at which Brythonic becomes Proto-Welsh.
Hence my sceptical reaction to Ariel's friend. I'd like to know exactly what she thought she could understand; to me "gist" means "I know they're talking about the weather/football/news/dinner and it's going to be wet/we'll lose/it's bad/arguing over the fish or the beef but I'm not quite sure of the details" and that I frankly cannot believe is possible with knowledge only of Irish.
It's a bit like the stories of Breton onion sellers in South Wales. Yes, they could be understood by the Welsh speakers. This is because the Breton onion sellers had learnt some Welsh - not a hard thing for a Breton speaker. The heavily accented Welsh may have been taken for Breton by people who knew the languages were related, but it was actually Welsh.
At this point someone will tell me that their grandfather who learnt a few words of Welsh in the War was able to chat at length in Breton when they went to Brittany. But I never hear these stories from the speakers themselves. They tell me the opposite - Irish speakers tell me they can read Scottish Gaelic but can't understand it spoken. In fact, they can barely understand the language from the opposite end of Ireland.
[ 30. June 2016, 11:32: Message edited by: Karl: Liberal Backslider ]
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
They tell me the opposite - Irish speakers tell me they can read Scottish Gaelic but can't understand it spoken. In fact, they can barely understand the language from the opposite end of Ireland.
I agree that I find it difficult to understand spoken Scottish Gaelic too but that last claim is quite untrue. I learnt Donegal Irish in Dublin and in recent years had refresher lessons with someone who spoke Munster Irish. The pronunciation does vary but it isn't unintelligible. The problem is only one if specific dialect words are used.
Having said that I struggle to understand Glaswegians and the Newcastle accent. But I suppose like anything it's familiarity with the vowel shifts, stresses and way consonants are pronounced. I hardly ever hear either of those accents around here.
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
It has been argued that all the Romance languages are just dialects of Latin. There was a time when one didn't distinguish French, Latin, etc -- it was just the local version of Our Language. (Dante writes of it this way, adding that the Tuscan is the right version.)
We may be at this stage with the dialects of English; in two thousand years they'll be entirely separate languages. (Or not: Youtube and recording may have frozen language evolution.)
I can understand spoken Chinese. When I hear spoken Japanese, I can't give you a word-for-word translation. But I can get the drift of what's being said easily. And my grip on Chinese is not grand; I would easily believe that if you were entirely fluent in it you could hop over to Japanese without difficulty.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
It has been argued that all the Romance languages are just dialects of Latin. There was a time when one didn't distinguish French, Latin, etc -- it was just the local version of Our Language. (Dante writes of it this way, adding that the Tuscan is the right version.)
We may be at this stage with the dialects of English; in two thousand years they'll be entirely separate languages. (Or not: Youtube and recording may have frozen language evolution.)
I can understand spoken Chinese. When I hear spoken Japanese, I can't give you a word-for-word translation. But I can get the drift of what's being said easily. And my grip on Chinese is not grand; I would easily believe that if you were entirely fluent in it you could hop over to Japanese without difficulty.
That's really strange, because the two languages aren't related - as far as anyone can figure out for sure Japanese isn't related to anything else - there are theories linking it to Korean, hut not to Chinese. I wonder if there are a lot of borrowings?
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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andras
Shipmate
# 2065
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:
Originally posted by andras:
Certainly the earliest written Welsh is much closer to the modern language than, say, Chaucer is to modern English.
And I suspect that if we could hear pre-Roman Welsh, a willing listener would be able to get the gist of it pretty quickly.
So yes, it's old!
No. Pre-Roman Brythonic would be almost the same as Gaulish, but the changes between that and Welsh are absolutely massive. A Latin speaker would have a better chance than a modern Welsh speaker, unless you for example fund 'uindos' is obviously a form of 'gwynt'.
The common -os ending in Brythonic is exactly one of those things that would cause a problem to start with, in the same way as the nasal vowels in Breton are an initial problem. But once the ear is attuned to it, it's surprising what one can grasp.
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God's on holiday.
(Why borrow a cat?)
Adrian Plass
Posts: 544 | From: Tregaron | Registered: Dec 2001
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Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
English and French are the chief outliers when it comes to strange uses of the Latin alphabet.
Irish gaelic? Vietnamese?
I thought Vietnamese was relatively 'normal' apart from the forest of tone marks? OTOH, North West Europe in general seems to have a very peculiar effect on orthography:
- English needs no introduction.
- French has rules, but they are only partly a means representing sounds. The other part is a form of denial of half the sound-changes that have happened since French was Latin.
- Irish and Scottish Gaelic also have rules, made up by people who thought 'how can we make this as complex as possible?' They are the ancestors of the engineer who decided that the best place to get access to my car's headlights is through the wheel-arch.
- The official orthography of Ulster Scots was more or less invented by the Good Friday Agreement to make it look as little like English as possible. If the Catholics can have their own language (Irish), then the Protestants must have one too.
- Manx was written down by clergyman on the basis of English, and thus combines all the inconsistency of English with the added problem of trying to represent non-English sounds.
- Welsh isn't too bad apart from the use of W as a vowel.
- Cornish is, or used to be, torn apart by a turf war over whether the revived language should reflect Tudor Cornish (when much of the literature was written) or the later phases of the language (to suggest that revived Cornish is a natural progression therefrom). There used to be sarcastic comments that Cornish has more orthographies than speakers.
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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)
Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
I can understand spoken Chinese. When I hear spoken Japanese, I can't give you a word-for-word translation. But I can get the drift of what's being said easily. And my grip on Chinese is not grand; I would easily believe that if you were entirely fluent in it you could hop over to Japanese without difficulty.
That's really strange, because the two languages aren't related - as far as anyone can figure out for sure Japanese isn't related to anything else - there are theories linking it to Korean, hut not to Chinese. I wonder if there are a lot of borrowings?
Dunno. But I do know there's massive cultural borrowing historically by the Japanese from the Chinese. Chipsticks, food, tech, military -- lots of stuff.
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Aravis
Shipmate
# 13824
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Posted
Place names in Brittany often have the Breton spelling of the name added to the road signs these days, and the link with Welsh is a lot easier to see. For example: in the early 1980s I visited a place in Brittany called Huelgoat with interesting rock formations and ancient trees, and didn't attempt to translate the name as there was no obvious connection with Welsh. But now the sign says "Uhel Goad" underneath it's pretty easy to make the connection with "uchel coed" which means "high wood" (I think... Or was it "low wood"? My Welsh is a bit patchy.)
Posts: 689 | From: S Wales | Registered: Jun 2008
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Sandemaniac
Shipmate
# 12829
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Posted
HCH mentioned Icelandic up thread. I am currently in Reykjavik and it is something of a point of pride that the language of the sagas (mostly written down in the 13th and 14th centuries) is almost entirely intelligible to readers of modern Icelandic, barring some obsolete technical terms. Compare with Chaucerian English, written very late in the same period... in
Some of this is deliberate, I understand that there is a linguistic committee who coin new words in order to prevent the equivalent of Le Weekend from occuring.
AG
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"It becomes soon pleasantly apparent that change-ringing is by no means merely an excuse for beer" Charles Dickens gets it wrong, 1869
Posts: 3574 | From: The wardrobe of my soul | Registered: Jul 2007
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Piglet
Islander
# 11803
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Posted
[tangent]
quote:
Originally posted by Sandemaniac:
... I am currently in Reykjavik ...
Envious, moi? Too right I am! ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
[/tangent]
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I may not be on an island any more, but I'm still an islander.
alto n a soprano who can read music
Posts: 20272 | From: Fredericton, NB, on a rather larger piece of rock | Registered: Sep 2006
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Aravis:
Place names in Brittany often have the Breton spelling of the name added to the road signs these days, and the link with Welsh is a lot easier to see. For example: in the early 1980s I visited a place in Brittany called Huelgoat with interesting rock formations and ancient trees, and didn't attempt to translate the name as there was no obvious connection with Welsh. But now the sign says "Uhel Goad" underneath it's pretty easy to make the connection with "uchel coed" which means "high wood" (I think... Or was it "low wood"? My Welsh is a bit patchy.)
High Wood. Uchel is from British *Uxela and shows the regular sound change of British X to Brythonic Ch, also found in Chwech, six, from the root *Suex-.
[ 01. July 2016, 08:27: Message edited by: Karl: Liberal Backslider ]
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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Albertus
Shipmate
# 13356
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
English and French are the chief outliers when it comes to strange uses of the Latin alphabet.
Irish gaelic? Vietnamese?
I thought Vietnamese was relatively 'normal' apart from the forest of tone marks? OTOH, North West Europe in general seems to have a very peculiar effect on orthography:
- English needs no introduction.
- French has rules, but they are only partly a means representing sounds. The other part is a form of denial of half the sound-changes that have happened since French was Latin.
- Irish and Scottish Gaelic also have rules, made up by people who thought 'how can we make this as complex as possible?' They are the ancestors of the engineer who decided that the best place to get access to my car's headlights is through the wheel-arch.
- The official orthography of Ulster Scots was more or less invented by the Good Friday Agreement to make it look as little like English as possible. If the Catholics can have their own language (Irish), then the Protestants must have one too.
- Manx was written down by clergyman on the basis of English, and thus combines all the inconsistency of English with the added problem of trying to represent non-English sounds.
- Welsh isn't too bad apart from the use of W as a vowel.
- Cornish is, or used to be, torn apart by a turf war over whether the revived language should reflect Tudor Cornish (when much of the literature was written) or the later phases of the language (to suggest that revived Cornish is a natural progression therefrom). There used to be sarcastic comments that Cornish has more orthographies than speakers.
Think I'm right in saying that modern Welsh orthography was standardised in the 1930s or thereabouts. At the moment I'm reading a late C19 edition of Daniel Owen's novel Rhys Lewis, and an awful lot of the spelling is not what would now be recognised as standard.
Posts: 6498 | From: Y Sowth | Registered: Jan 2008
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
I think I'd add that:
1. The discrepancy between written and spoken forms of French (all those not pronounced final letters) are more to do with changes in pronunciation from Old French to Modern French rather than from Latin.
2.Manx orthography is a weird cross between English and Welsh.
3. There's nothing wrong with using w as a vowel. It's a semi-vowel in English and it naturally enough can do service as "oo". It makes more sense for that value than the English digraph does. Welsh can't use 'u' for this because 'u' has a different value - same as 'i' in the South and somewhere between 'i' and a French 'u' in the North.
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Sandemaniac:
HCH mentioned Icelandic up thread. I am currently in Reykjavik and it is something of a point of pride that the language of the sagas (mostly written down in the 13th and 14th centuries) is almost entirely intelligible to readers of modern Icelandic, barring some obsolete technical terms. Compare with Chaucerian English, written very late in the same period... in
Some of this is deliberate, I understand that there is a linguistic committee who coin new words in order to prevent the equivalent of Le Weekend from occuring.
AG
Only in written form to be fair; the vowel system has completely changed from Old Norse to modern Icelandic; all those accented vowels were simply long vowels in Old Norse, whereas they're now a seperate series of vowels with long and short variants of their own, IIRC. The consonants have changed a bit as well.
None of this makes up for Icelandic being quite the most impenetrably difficult language I've ever attempted to achieve any kind of familiarity with. What sort of language uses case inflection (with three genders and more inflection patterns than you can shake a stick at - think Latin with 40 declensions) and inflected post-positioned definite articles and prepositions! And that's before the pain of strong and weak adjectives...
[ 01. July 2016, 10:17: Message edited by: Karl: Liberal Backslider ]
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
Thanks - useful posts and comments.
I'm not clear as to how/when ancient Brythonic morphed into modern Welsh - or something akin to it - I'd assumed around the 6th/7th century on the basis that Y Gododdin by Aneurin is generally reckoned the first Welsh poem, 'Men went to Catraeth ...' etc. I'm only familiar with English translations.
I grew up in South Wales so was familiar with the stories of Breton onion-sellers on bikes being able to converse with people but always regarded it as something of an urban (or Valleys) myth.
I can't remember where exactly, but I seem to remember that Dylan Thomas has a wry pop at this idea in one of his short-stories, vignettes when the narrator greets the 'Sioni Onion Man' in French, only to receive the response, 'There's French for you, Dai Bach!'
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I've heard similar stories about Geordie fishermen meeting their Friesian counterparts in the middle of the North Sea and being able to converse quite happily.
I take that with a pinch of salt.
I less difficulty believing that Cornish and Breton fishermen could converse when their boats met mid-Channel though ... but again, like Karl, I've not heard this from Cornish or Breton speakers themselves.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I've heard similar stories about Geordie fishermen meeting their Friesian counterparts in the middle of the North Sea and being able to converse quite happily.
I take that with a pinch of salt.
So'd I, especially since the Geordie distinctives come from Old Norse, not Old English (which is the closest relative of Frisian)
quote:
I less difficulty believing that Cornish and Breton fishermen could converse when their boats met mid-Channel though ... but again, like Karl, I've not heard this from Cornish or Breton speakers themselves.
To be fair, there aren't that many Cornish speakers to ask, and almost none of them are mother-tongue Cornish. Modern Cornishes are a bit of an artificial amalgam; there was no continuity of Cornish as a community language into the early revivalists, which is why they eventually based their revived language on Tudor or earlier Cornish which had more of an attested corpus. But I digress.
Mutual intelligibility is a funny thing. It depends on the individual, to a degree, on how familiar they are with older forms of their language (which will differ less from the related languages), of how wide their vocabulary is (a cognate may be common in the other language but rare in ones own). It also can be lopsided; Portuguese speakers on average understand Spanish better than the other way round; indeed, some Spanish speakers report finding Italian more comprehensible than Portuguese.
Also, because writing is clearer than speech, reduces (or eliminates) the problem of accent and where it diverges from the written language tends to be more conservative, written mutual comprehensibility tends to be higher than spoken. I could believe a Breton speaker reading and understanding a Cornish text better than they'd understand a Cornish speaker.
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I've heard similar stories about Geordie fishermen meeting their Friesian counterparts in the middle of the North Sea and being able to converse quite happily.
You can actually say "the beer is good" and be understood in English or Friesian because the words are quite similar. With some kinds of accent the similarities would be more pronounced.
It doesn't work for a full conversation but keep it simple and you can still communicate.
Many years ago I had flatmates whose native tongue wasn't English, and who were here to learn EFL. Italian mostly (though not always) worked on the Brazilian flatmate as a rough substitute for Portuguese. The Japanese one was a challenge though. We sometimes had to draw pictures or just point at things to communicate. and when she got flu and forgot most of her English I had to get a bilingual Japanese-English girl to come and translate.
Posts: 25445 | Registered: May 2001
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andras
Shipmate
# 2065
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Posted
My daughter in Cardiff currently has a lady staying with her from Patagonia who only has Welsh and Spanish and I find it interesting just how little her (excellent) Welsh has been influenced by the Spanish.
And back at the time of the Falklands War S4C (the Welsh-language TV channel) was able to tap into the Argentinean view of things via the Welsh speakers.
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God's on holiday.
(Why borrow a cat?)
Adrian Plass
Posts: 544 | From: Tregaron | Registered: Dec 2001
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Knopwood
Shipmate
# 11596
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I've heard similar stories about Geordie fishermen meeting their Friesian counterparts in the middle of the North Sea and being able to converse quite happily.
I take that with a pinch of salt.
I less difficulty believing that Cornish and Breton fishermen could converse when their boats met mid-Channel though ... but again, like Karl, I've not heard this from Cornish or Breton speakers themselves.
The onion vendor anecdote comes from the PBS documentary The Story of English. This programme sees Eddie Izzard trying to speak Anglo-Saxon to a Frisian farmer - the subject matter has certainly been cherry-picked for optimum vocabulary.
[ 01. July 2016, 20:30: Message edited by: Knopwood ]
Posts: 6806 | From: Tio'tia:ke | Registered: Jun 2006
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
English and French are the chief outliers when it comes to strange uses of the Latin alphabet.
Irish gaelic? Vietnamese?
I thought Vietnamese was relatively 'normal' apart from the forest of tone marks?
You don't find the tone marks rather strange? I can't think of any other orthography based on the Latin alphabet that is that strange looking.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I heard the onion vendor story several times as I was growing up in South Wales in the 1970s.
I suspect that with all these stories some incidences of fleeting comprehension over a handful of words and phrases htew in the telling.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
I heard the onion vendor story several times as I was growing up in South Wales in the 1970s.
I suspect that with all these stories some incidences of fleeting comprehension over a handful of words and phrases htew in the telling.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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