Researchers claim that 'whole nation 'could speak Welsh' within 300 years'

[8ball]

Ugain Tudalen

Pump.
Mwyafswm.

 

[editor]

Ages since I read anything about him but IIRC it's actually more interesting precisely because he was making some sort of cultural saviour claim by taking the title and that must have been based on growing feelings of national resentment against the interlopers, but as it's put gets too tied up with a back-projected anachronistic kingdom or even nation state.

Why shouldn't Wales be a nation state rather than a piddling 'Principality'?

 

[8ball]

Why shouldn't Wales be a nation state rather than a piddling 'Principality'?

Ah, go on then. I've made it a country.
See: Wales - Wikipedia

Good times.

 

[Proper Tidy]

So - just to clear this up - you don't think that he should even be mentioned in any part of Welsh school history, yes? Because that's the only point I made.

Just to be clear, no I don't think that. My first post explicitly said I didn't think that. Just to be clear.

 

[Combustible]

Point being, that sort of commonplace bilingualism is really pretty widespread, surely must apply to a lot of the other big multilingual nations.

The difference may be that in China it is the minority languages which are passed down by the parents and spoken at home, while the prestige language Mandarin is hammered in at school and in wider society. Both those seem to be pretty strong motivators for getting people to speak a language as a native speaker. I find still find it amazing how my wife didn't really speak Mandarin at home, with her family or her village, yet speaks it like a native.

Whereas for many in Wales， English is both the home language and prestige language, which surely makes getting more Welsh native speaking families more difficult

 

[maomao]

But written Chinese is standard? I'd understood that people with different spoken languages could communicate with each other by drawing out the characters on their hand.

I'm not saying it never happens like that, indeed I've seen Japanese and Chinese do that but some Chinese characters can be twenty plus brush strokes so yes you can do that for water (four or five strokes, I can't count them anymore) but you would struggle to express more complex ideas like that.

Also the whole 'only one written standard of Chinese' is just nationalist arrogance. 'That word he just said is a mandarin word really he just pronounced it wrong, he's speaking a dialect not proper Chinese' . Everything on Chinese TV is subtitled for this reason. Several less well known members of the Chinese language family have or have had their own written standards. And I can't make head nor tail of a Cantonese newspaper. I could probably tell you the topic and guess a few words but the vocabulary and grammar are very different.

Anyway. Welsh. Second most spoken language in the country I come from (the UK) and all I can say is microwave and fanny. Can't even say hello.

 

[maomao]

. Second most spoken language in the country I come from

I'm wrong by the way. That's Polish but only by a little bit.

 

[Proper Tidy]

I'm not saying it never happens like that, indeed I've seen Japanese and Chinese do that but some Chinese characters can be twenty plus brush strokes so yes you can do that for water (four or five strokes, I can't count them anymore) but you would struggle to express more complex ideas like that.

Also the whole 'only one written standard of Chinese' is just nationalist arrogance. 'That word he just said is a mandarin word really he just pronounced it wrong, he's speaking a dialect not proper Chinese' . Everything on Chinese TV is subtitled for this reason. Several less well known members of the Chinese language family have or have had their own written standards. And I can't make head nor tail of a Cantonese newspaper. I could probably tell you the topic and guess a few words but the vocabulary and grammar are very different.

Anyway. Welsh. Second most spoken language in the country I come from (the UK) and all I can say is microwave and fanny. Can't even say hello.

It's helô

 

[two sheds]

Isn't "about 300 years" the time when women will be paid the same as men?

 

[8ball]

Isn't "about 300 years" the time when women will be paid the same as men?

If climate change is severe enough it might turn out like that.

 

[Plumdaff]

Also, I hate to ruin the joke but microwave in Welsh isn't popty ping. It's meicrodon. Sori pawb.

 

[Pickman's model]

If you're from Inverness and learn Gaelic in Glasgow, which accent will you speak it in?

Depends on the teacher, who may be from Fort William

 

[JimW]

Why shouldn't Wales be a nation state rather than a piddling 'Principality'?

I meant back then, when hardly anywhere was, whole concept of nation state mainly a 19th century invention

 

[Poi E]

Was just thinking about here in China, where because it's one state you miss that there's dozens of Chinese-family languages that coexist with Mandarin but are in fact nearly as different from the standard than even Welsh from English - leaving aside non-Han languages which are a whole other thing. So other day was with a friend from Suzhou where they speak a Wu (IIRC) type of Chinese. He works in beijing and speaks perfect locally accented Madarin, but he also phoned his dad at one point and suddenly you remember his native language is something else. My wife was there too, and they speak one of the dialects of Min in her hometown, yet her mandarin is also native level. Last was a (Inner) Mongolian friend; he does have a bit of an accent and is not quite so fluent in Mandarin but has zero problems with it as a day-to-day language.
Point being, that sort of commonplace bilingualism is really pretty widespread, surely must apply to a lot of the other big multilingual nations.

My wife flips easily between Xhosa, Afrikaans and English. South Africa is brilliant for that with 12 official languages. Speaking only one language is mainly a feature of what they call the "English" ethnic group in SA (mostly British descent, or so they like to think.)