The Welsh, and the English language.

[The Spanish]

its sad that the celts lost their languages or came close to but thats what unrestricted mass immigration and a more vibrant and aggressive immigrant culture does.

 

[Gwylan]

People will move heave and earth for an endangered species, if it's charismatic enough (pandas, e.g.) but for languages, not so much. Yet extinction is forever for both.

Especially Latin?

 

[Lush]

Especially Latin?

Exactly. Language is a moving changing thing. While we can bemoan the loss of languages and dialects, new ones are being created at the same time. Innit bruv?

 

[Winker]

wes pu hal - hu gaep hit

(It's about time us south saxons demanded that our road signs etc were in anglo-saxon as well as the usual bastard norman variation)

ic pancie pe

(apologies for the spelling but my computer can't handle the alphabet)

 

[looney]

I wonder how many of you snivelling whiney leftwing types will apply the same logic to pounds and ounces, the langauge of numbers which this wretched Government tried to destroy in a fit of self hating pique.

Sucking up to johnny foreigner is one thing but doing it while pissing on pensioners etc is only going to muster support for the BNP.

Oh and my contempt.

so now its time for the eulogisers in this thread to claim "they were in the resistance" and supported metric or explain their positions.

 

[perseus]

The most recent census figures (2001) presented in "Main Statistics about Welsh"[8] by the Welsh Language Board, indicate 582,400 (20.8% of the population of Wales in households or communal establishments) were able to speak Welsh and 457,946 (16.3%) can speak, read and write it. This compares with 508,100 (18.7%) for 1991. Increasing use of the English language had led to a decline in the numbers of Welsh speakers. Since the introduction of the Welsh Language Act 1993, giving Welsh equal status with English in the public sector in Wales, this has been slowed.[citation needed]

The results of the "2004 Welsh Language Use Survey" indicate that there are 611,000 Welsh speakers in Wales (21.7% of the population living in households, a lower figure of 19.7% is given in the same paper), 62% claim to speak Welsh daily, and 88% of those fluent in the language speak it daily.[8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language

Sussex is South Saxon (sort of Frisian/Belgium language), no placenames in our county are Welsh, except perhaps Lewes.

Languages of the United Kingdom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Lord Bracknell]

During the seven years I lived in Newport, I think the only Welsh I ever heard was the national anthem. The last time I was there, it could be heard spoken on the streets. The place even has Welsh speaking schools these days.

 

[looney]

Sussex is South Saxon (sort of Frisian/Belgium language), no placenames in our county are Welsh, except perhaps Lewes.

Llancing, Crawlech and Gwenchelsea?

 

[Nottseagull]

I visited Cardiff for a concert last year, and obviously all the signs are bi-lingual. The only word which stuck in my head is the Welsh word for 'taxi', which is......tacsi.

They have no X, hence Wrecsam. Don't know what the Welsh speakers are going to put on the ballot papers on Thursday.....

 

[Hove Lagoonery]

Llancing, Crawlech and Gwenchelsea?

Abergess Hill

 

[perseus]

491
Her Ælle 7 Cissa ymbsæton Andredescester 7 ofslogon alle þa þe þærinne eardedon; ne wearþ þær forþon an Bret to lafe.

(NB: 7 = Tyronian ampersand = &)

This is written in Old English not Welsh







































= 490. This year Ælle and Cissa besieged the city of Andredescester, and slew all that were therein; nor was one Briton left there afterwards.

But these were not the Welsh but Romanised Britons (now all dead) living in what the English (really Germans or Saxons) then called it Pevensey.

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

Alot of British people today are still distant descendents from the original Gaelic speaking Celts.

It's just that they mixed in with whoever was the new arrival after a few years of beating each other up.

The whole anglo-saxon thing is overblown as a represenatation of the Islands peoples.

 

[Gwylan]

Alot of British people today are still distant descendents from the original Gaelic speaking Celts.

Or even older, as the research on Cheddar Man showed
Cheddar Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But we're such a mash-up of people that I suspect that you could take the DNA of any three people on NSC at random and find they have completely different racial/geographic roots.

What's a more interesting question is why so little of the orginal Celtic (Welsh/Gaelic) language survives in English today - the language of the invaders has completely swamped the indigenous language. Off the top of my head, I can only think of adder (Welsh for snake is nadr) as a survivor, although I'm sure there are a couple of others.

 

[captainmorganrum]

What's a more interesting question is why so little of the orginal Celtic (Welsh/Gaelic) language survives in English today - the language of the invaders has completely swamped the indigenous language. Off the top of my head, I can only think of adder (Welsh for snake is nadr) as a survivor, although I'm sure there are a couple of others.

quim
a slang term for vagina, may possibly derive from the Welsh word "cwm" meaning "valley."

 

[perseus]

After the Ice Age

In Origins of the British (2006), Stephen Oppenheimer states (pages 375 and 378):
"By far the majority of male gene types in the British Isles derive from Iberia (Spain and Portugal), ranging from a low of 59% in Fakenham, Norfolk to highs of 96% in Llangefni, north Wales and 93% Castlerea, Ireland. On average only 30% of gene types in England derive from north-west Europe. Even without dating the earlier waves of north-west European immigration, this invalidates the Anglo-Saxon wipeout theory..."
"...75-95% of British Isles (genetic) matches derive from Iberia... Ireland, coastal Wales, and central and west-coast Scotland are almost entirely made up from Iberian founders, while the rest of the non-English parts of the British Isles have similarly high rates. England has rather lower rates of Iberian types with marked heterogeneity, but no English sample has less than 58% of Iberian samples..."
In page 367 Oppenheimer states in relation to Zoë H Rosser's pan-European genetic distance map:
"In Rosser's work, the closest population to the Basques is in Cornwall, followed closely by Wales, Ireland, Scotland, England, Spain, Belgium, Portugal and then northern France."

 

[Gwylan]

Perseus, that looks a cracking book. And one I'm adding to my list - a combination of my interests in things Welsh, the history of Sussex and in language generally

 

[Notters' Dad]

I'm with Gwylam on that.

 

[Lady Whistledown]

I wonder how many of you snivelling whiney leftwing types will apply the same logic to pounds and ounces, the langauge of numbers which this wretched Government tried to destroy in a fit of self hating pique.

I love it when people bang on about the metric vs imperial debate, as though it's some kind of horrendous new-fangled evil that the nasty Euro-loving Blair-ites forced upon us just out of spite.

I am 32, and was always taught the metric system at school, from about 1980 onwards. I believe it was actually introduced some time in the 1970s in fact. That's how long it's been in place- so suggesting that "this wretched Government" is responsible for your own inability to cope with a few simple numbers is not only wrong but I would suggest deliberatly misleading on your part.

As for people "suffering" as a result: well I've managed to learn vaguely what imperial measurements equate to, on top of the standard metric system I was officially taught, so I'm sure if I can cope, you and millions of others can too. I occasionally have to ask someone how many ounces there are in a pound, or pounds in a stone, but I can live with that. The only thing that leaves me clueless is when old farts like you STILL crap on about the price of petrol per gallon, or how many miles a car does to a gallon. I haven't a clue what a gallon is, but I do know the price of petrol per litre.

If you still haven't come around to the metric system at least thirty years after it was introduced- well I'd hate to think how you cope with any other changes in your life.

You do know the earth is round, right?

PS printing instructions in Welsh has absolutely no impact on me or you so why get wound up about it?

 

[Gwylan]

Bang on Edna. I'm 52 and I was taught metric (and solely in metric) at secondary school - having spent the first 11 years of my life getting used to Imperial measures - but it didn't take too long to get used to it. A couple of years later, I had to get used to a new currency too but everyone coped.

I really don't understand why people get worked up about metric measures - it's the system that nearly everyone on NSC would have been taught in and it's by far the easiest to use.

 

[perseus]

£SD

Bang on Edna. I'm 52 and I was taught metric (and solely in metric) at secondary school - having spent the first 11 years of my life getting used to Imperial measures - but it didn't take too long to get used to it. A couple of years later, I had to get used to a new currency too but everyone coped.

I really don't understand why people get worked up about metric measures - it's the system that nearly everyone on NSC would have been taught in and it's by far the easiest to use.

£SD was compulsory at my school. It was made illegal in 1971.