Talk:Welsh language/Archive 1

message: Is the consonant mutation similar to Japanese "rendaku"?
I don't know enough Japanese yet to answer your question, but this article should help Welsh morphology --193.195.185.254 02:50, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Mutation and Japanese

message: Interesting article! I'd love to see, one day, a map showing the regions where Welsh is spoken. --Auximines 14:33, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: These any good to you?  Marnanel 15:50, Apr 7, 2004 (UTC)
I have removed Merioneth from the list, as it has been included within Gwynedd since 1974. It is unclear what the "regions" are supposed to be. Gwynedd, Denbighshire, Carmarthenshire etc (but not Glamorgan) are current local authority areas; if this is a list of local authority areas then Conwy should be added. Rhion 14:25, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The regions where Welsh is spoken

message: I removed the following section:
:A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi accent has so much in common with Welsh. 
:Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common. 
:It has long been known that the two languages stem from Indo-European, the "mother of all languages" - but the peculiar similarities between the two accents when spoken in English are striking. 
:Remarkably, no-one has yet done a direct proper comparative study between the two languages to found out why this is so, says Ms Mathur.
For one thing, this has been copied word-for-word from , making it a copyvio.
But more to the point, Ms Mathur's amateurish speculations are unlikely to yield any useful results. If any professional linguists "come forward to help solve" this "mystery", I can predict what the results will be: Welsh and Hindi are both pitch-accent languages, resulting in superficial intonational similarities in the respective accents of English. The fact that Welsh and Hindi are both pitch-accent languages is probably coincidental, as Welsh at least does not preserve the Proto-Indo-European pitch accent (Proto-Celtic almost certainly had a stress accent). And calling Indo-European "the mother of all languages" is just absurd, and really shoddy journalism. --Angr 10:38, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Exactly. Ms Mathur's own research [!] on basic words, such as the numbers one to 10, found that many were similar - "seven", for example, is "saith" in Welsh, "saat" in Hindi.  And sept in French, and sieben in German, etc etc etc... It is pretty shocking that this sort of rubbish can pass for news on the BBC website. A quick glance at "My First Easy Book of Linguistics" would have been all the "research" necessary, without bothering any professors. No doubt some corporate agenda is at work to do with showing how wonderfully culturally diverse this BBC is or at least would like to be. My own painstaking original research has now revealed that the whale is not a fish (nor even an insect, as E. L. Wisty claimed) -- it's actually related to the sabre-toothed tiger, which is the mother of all animals. But does the BBC give me the coverage my dramatic findings so obviously deserve? Huh! Flapdragon 18:28, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Searching for the [[Welsh]]-[[Hindi]] link" removed 

message: According to the Wales article, 28.43% of the population of Wales have some sort of knowledge of the Welsh language. However, that adds up to 825,000. I edited the article to say speakers: 580,000-825,000. Was this correct? Anomynous South African Wikipedian 22:24, 22 March 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Number of Welsh speakers

message: I'm pretty sure 35,000 monoglots was orders of magnitude on the high side.  I did come across an estimate of 3000, but even that was accompanied by the statement it was surprisingly high.  More often one sees that there are "no adult monoglots" (i.e. there will be some number of pre-schoolers that are).  Is there perhaps some small number of elderly monos?  Another statistic that might be interesting is how many consider it their first language, use it on a daily basis, or some such formula.  Alai 00:55, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Monoglots

message: Removed:
:This article describes the Welsh language. For other meanings of Welsh, see Welsh.
This page has a very specific title.  I can't see how anyone will arrive at it unless they are intentionally looking for information about the Welsh language.  
It is entirely different from the following other two cases:
*On page Wales: "For alternate meanings, see Wales (disambiguation)"
*On page Welsh people: "This article is about the Welsh as an ethnic group. For information about residents or nationals of Wales, see demographics of Wales."
because in each of these two cases, the title of the page is such that someone could reasonably have arrived there while looking for the information contained elsewhere.
130.246.132.26 15:35, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair enough. I have no strong feelings either way. I only put it there because I saw the removal of the link to Wales (or to the disambig page, perhaps; I forget) and thought that it made more sense to link "for alternatives.." to Welsh than to Wales. But yes: people arriving on this page probably expected to arrive here in the first place.  Telsa 15:50, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link to disambig removed 

message: You say "These days, the aspirate mutation is only really carried out for words beginning with C in colloquial language and in some areas it is totally unknown".
Surely it is in general use to differentiate between 'ei' "his" and 'ei' "her"? For example,
"ei dad" - his father; "ei thad" - her father.
"ei gaws" - his cheese; "ei chaws" - her cheese.
"ei ben" - his head; "ei phen" - her head.
The article should be changed to reflect this. 
10:11, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure it is, given that spoken Welsh uses pronouns after the noun in such cases. I can easily imagine there are dialects where the A.M. is not used in the spoken language at all, and the only way to distinguish "his father" from "her father" is ei dad e vs. ei dad hi. --Angr/ 10:44, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aspirate mutation 

message: I don't understand why in the education section, we are told that most Welsh universities are bilingual, most notably, Bangor. What's so notable about Bangor? All the University of Wales collages are bilingual, I live in Ceredigion, and whilst Lampeter isn't the best at it's bilingual obligations, Aberystwyth are most certainly no 'less' bilingual than Bangor - the same goes for Trinity College, Carmarthen. All three have policies of translating all their documents into Welsh, and all three offer courses through the medium of Welsh. Maybe we should reword this section, unless someone knows why Bangor was picked out in the first place? Twrist 14:21, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Welsh in Education - Prifysgol Cymru, Bangor?

message: More recently, Welsh regiments serving in Bosnia used Welsh for emergency communications that needed to be secure.
Any source for this? Not doubting it, just intrigued. Flapdragon 14:40, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Someone, somewhere, must have written about this in a form we can use. The story crops up again and again. It came up on S4C the other night where in the course of vox pops someone said something along the lines of "I've forgotten all my Welsh, but I was in the army, we used it then, we had to, you know, to confuse the Germans". (Popeth yn Gymraeg: I think it was the one which visits Brecon.) I've heard it said several times before, although often with different dates/places attached. If it happened, surely it is written down somewhere. Any fans of 20th century biography or military history out there? (A cite from an autobiography with an ISBN sounds so much better than "unnamed interview subject in street" :)) --Telsa 10:30, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Welsh in warfare: Bosnia 

message: (The following is a duplicate of comments I made here: Talk:Scottish_English#Inaccurate_map.)
The following map has been applied to the English English page, and to Scottish English:
It appears to have one major flaw, and several quibbles:
*Where on earth is the Scots language? Its ommission seems particularly inappropriate considering the debt owed to Scots by Scottish English. Somewhat bizarrely, only one dialect of Scots is included, and that is the tiny number of Ulster Scots speakers, only about 2% of all Scots-speakers! I know that the map is titled "Selected languages", but it is baffling why the only language the auther has "selected" not to include is Scots!
*Why on earth have two distinct languages, Scottish Gaelic language and Irish language, been shown as a homogenous blob?
*Highland English is missing: another rather stark absence on this Scottish English page.
*Why are several subdivisions of English English shown, but only two of Scottish English? The differences between the Fife dialect and Aberdonian are just as big, if not bigger, than the differences between Brummie and Yorkshire dialect.
*Where on earth did Shetland go? A stunning ommission, considering that it is one of the most distictive linguistic groups in the entire British Isles?
I find it very depressing to hear that a German textbook publisher wants to use it in textbooks for 600 schools. No wonder many people grow up with a very strange perception of the language situation in the United Kingdom.--Mais oui! 10:35, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inaccurate map