I visited Wales as a teenager in the late 80s. My mother was a linguist so, when we saw the street signs she and I both said: "WHAT is THIS?!" We were both fascinated that such an ancient minority language was able to survive and thrive in modern Britain. A few years later, when I was at UCLA studying British History, I thought: "Let me just learn how it sounds". Then, it was "Let me just learn a few words". Then, it became "Let me just learn a few phrases". Decades later, I am still obsessed; especially after I learned how the English put so much effort into killing off the Welsh language along with killing off the Welsh people. And, it makes me so angry when people like James Corden say things like "The Welsh language has just not caught on. Why do they bother with it?"...as if it were the fault of the Welsh people that their language has been suppressed. His attitude is so typical and so disgusting that the fight for the Welsh language is still the fight against English colonialism, 800 years on from the Conquest.
I think the world over, when people try to push out another language it is because when you speak another language you have another soul that people in power through another language cannot change and form to their will.
I know this is from 3 months ago but as a person from Wales I can confirm barely any of us know Welsh. There are 1,000 students in my school, yet none know Welsh. I wish we knew Welsh better but I’m also glad that I know a language most people know.
Ah yes, particularly when there was no Internet, you should have had a good time remembering Canol y Dre, Safle Bws, Un Ffordd, Arafu, Dim Mynediad, and the like!
The English are majority Celtic peoples so how can you blame it on English colonialism when the colonialists left with the colonised remaining referred to as English? If anything the English are the most oppressed and colonised because we've lost our language completely.
You make such a great case for learning Welsh! I’m now taking my second class of Cornish - closely related to Welsh. And I love it so much. It is so much fun and so fascinating to learn. I do not find it nearly as difficult as my high school German.
Currently learning Welsh via Duolingo, I don't find it "easy" but extremely interesting and aesthetically I love how it sounds, today 5/31/22 marks my 100 day Duolingo streak learning Welsh woohoo!! There's a lot of inconsistencies in the language specifically regarding sentence structure/ syntax etc, and some words of course are extremely long similar to German, nonetheless it's a joy learning !!
Great video, Ben! I dearly cherish my Welsh heritage and have finally been able to learn Welsh as of this year, so this really helped to fan those flames! Loving history and linguistics, I really appreciate how much you tied in the traceability of history and cultural influence that linguistics affords. French is my second language, so Welsh's Latin influence has really helped me to pick things up quickly. Diolch yn fawr a Cymru am byth!
I’ve started learning welsh on duolingo yesterday and, I might be wrong, but the grammar seems quite simple actually. For example to conjugate any word you just use « Dw i’n + verb » which I think is fantastic. And as a fluent frennch speaker and also some knowledge of spanish I really see their connections in some words like « nos » or « cinio » just to name a few. I’m really motivated to keep going :D
@@maxmz_ definitely anything that gets you some key vocab to help is good. If you live in Wales just try and listen to Radio cymru as much as possible and watch s4c. And don't worry about grammar too much as many people use English Syntax and loan words all the time.
It's starts to get a little more complicated but you'll be fine as it is easy to understand the changes. Just remember Welsh is mainly a Verb,Subject,object word order.Has no indefinite article such as (a) or (an) even though they use a and an in translations. And Welsh is slightly flowery or elongated saying a lot more than English and sometimes less. If you keep those 3 simple rules you'll have no problem.What people forget is language is not just word meanings but the mentality and intention behind the words. For example Welsh says Nac ydw ,which means 'no'.But if you translate it literally it means 'No - yes'. So WTF.! I figured it out.They are softening the no. So it really is 'no to your yes' or NO yes.🤔👍🏴
@@jasonjames6870 I was watching s4c when I first started learning Welsh. I can't stomach it anymore it's so woke and the constant anti Welsh attitude was nauseating. Say something in Welsh is a great free app though.
Thankyou thankyou thankyou for blowing the myth apart that it's hard to learn Welsh. I'm English and now a fluent Welsh speaker..have raised my 3 children to speak it. I live in Wales and being bilingual is so exciting and freeing. Most of the people in our world speak more rhan 1 language... Try it ! Diolch o fynghalon xxx
@@liambyrne5285 I did 4 90 min lessons a week for 6 months, then when I had my first child I decided to only speak Welsh. We grew and learned together after that. I have 3 children all grown up now and there is no English spoken in our home. Obviously we are all bilingual but our mother tongue is Welsh. I did the Wlpan Course but I recommend "Say Something in Welsh..." it's an app. It's wonderful. Becoming bilingual is the best thing! Best of luck 🙂
Once I visited Wales and looked so pretty there. The street signs looked so complicated at the time. Now I want to learn a new language and I have decided to do Welsh as I have heard it is the easiest one to learn.
I'm Polish and I'm learning Welsh with Duolingo. It's definitely more difficult for me, but it helps that I speak French. However, many points you described make it indeed easier than for instance Hebrew, another language I tried to learn, but I gave up.
I've been learning Welsh on Duolingo for just over a month and I'm loving it, finding myself watching Welsh speakers and thinking I know what that word means is an amazing feeling I can't wait to be able to understand whole conversations 😍
this is such a fantastic video! my familys from wales but moved to england quite a while back, i started learning a few months back and its incredibly fun, diolch!
I just came back to say diolch yn fawr - this video (and especially also your video 'things I wish I knew when I started learning Welsh') really encouraged me to start learning Welsh. One week later and I'm totally hooked! You explain it so well. Being half German and having studied Arabic, I'm finding a lot of the Welsh sounds come quite naturally. The one thing I'm struggling with so far is remembering how to pronounce all the diphthongs, but your point about it being phonetic is spurring me on :-)
Nearly a year later and my partner and I are still learning Welsh every day via Duolingo and also organically as we now live in Wales. We love it. Saddened to hear that the Duolingo Welsh course is no longer to be updated. I've just signed the petition about it. Big thanks again from us both for starting us on our Welsh learning journey!
Great video and I love your channel Ben! I am definitely convinced to learn Welsh one day! I love reading about Welsh mythology and folklore, so learning the language would be amazing. You seem very passionate about the Welsh language and culture!
I use Duo Lingo for written Welsh, and Say Something in Welsh for spoken Welsh. SSIW has been intense but worth it. Its a brain melting but fast way to learn. It also helps with the mutations as you're constantly hearing them in context.
Nice fideo, and as a Welsh-speaker, many things I hadn't thought of, and yes, we're always told Welsh is difficult (I'm guessing mostly because of the mutations). We do retain one case from Brythonic (ancient Welsh, spoken here when the Romans came) is the vocative, but that's not hard and not necessary. The initial letter can mutate, so, 'plant' (children) is 'blant' when you're, say, calling your kids to come in for supper or do something!
Diolch yn fawr Siôn. Diddorol iawn am y 'vocative'. I think for many that thinking Cymraeg is difficult is an easy, cost-effective way mentally to demean the language and its culture and to brush if off as not necessary and to cast into the grass.
thanks for this video! I was honestly amazed to discover that welsh has a lateral fricative like south-american languages and an uvular fricative like hebrew. I taught myself the lateral fricative pronunciation while self-teaching linguistics and it is so easy to produce. I have no plan of moving to Wales at the moment but I'll keep in mind that I can totally learn Welsh if I ever have or want to. Beautiful sounds. from a French guy, cheers!
As a Chinese I find learning Welsh is pretty difficult from the perspective of vocabulary and grammar, also the lack of learning materials But I find pronouncing Welsh words is pretty easy, I especially love the pronunciation of "ll","ch" and "rh" in Welsh
Dualingo is a surprisingly good course for Welsh.Very comprehensive with 69 parts and roughly 3000 lessons or more. Also Hippocrene had an App. Which comes with their Welsh course and is easy to set up.There is also a Welsh version of Harry Potter's Philosopher Stone.Hywl fawr 👍🏴
Say something in Welsh is a free app where you just listen and repeat. It's really good. Helped me loads. Duolingo only took me so far although I still practice on it everyday.
Great! Thank you for the massively encouraging message of being called ignorant! That's really helpful for someone who has been studying for months and feeling pretty defeated for still getting nowhere! Thank you for helping me want to keep going and not give up. I'm simply ignorant for not getting it! 🙄
Born and bred in Cardiff, never learnt Welsh but oh how I wish I did. They did try to teach us at school. Not many people spoke Welsh in Cardiff back then though (I left in the 80's)
I've been visiting Wales (Aberystwyth) in 2015 and 2016, for a project in collaboration we had. I fell in love with the city. So safe. So nice and polite people. And so funny to take a train from Birmingham. Is a train that splits in two directions in the middle of the way to Aberystwyth, and people usually have no idea which carriages/wagon go to the city or to the other destination. the ticket guy comes and says out loud something like: to the Aberystwth take the X carriage, or stay here, and to the other do the opposite... I tried to learn Welsh, but the few words I still remember are: Diolch, diolch yn fawr iawn, sut wyt ti, amser te...
I wouldn’t say Welsh was an easy language to learn. In fact, I would say all languages are difficult to learn and take years and years if you want to speak and understand them like a native. Welsh is easier than some languages grammatically, yes However, what sets Welsh apart from many other European languages is that it’s vocabulary is unique and not shared among other languages. Take the word for “sun” for example, you can see a connection between most languages: Spanish: Sol Swedish: Sol Italian: Sole French: Soleil Danish: Sol German: Sonne Croatian: Sunce Polish: Słónce However, in Welsh it is: Haul This is true for much of Welsh vocabulary, it has a unique vocabulary base which doesn’t resemble the vocabulary of other European languages. That automatically makes Welsh a more difficult language because the vocabulary is very different and has less in common with other European languages.
This can be solved once you learn why sound changes happened. Is it a lot to taken it, but it can be done. I am glad you took the time to watch and respond. Thank you.
Take me to the Welsh World/Language! That's what you've done with this video. - BTW, you have a relaxing voice, that helps a lot to get what you want. Greetings from Colombia
Anyone learning Welsh don't be discouraged by some of the first language speaker's you meet. Unfortunately some Welsh people aren't that great when it comes to learner's but fortunately many are and will appreciate the effort.
@@BenLlywelyn definitely but I think you get better receptions in different places. Like say you go to France or Poland they are really patient and love you trying. Scandinavia they simply switch to English again trying to be polite and helpful. But there are some people here in Wales that for some reason only want Welsh speaking Welsh and can discourage people. Fortunately I think and hope they are in the minority.
I’ve been learning Welsh on Duolingo for a few months. I picked Welsh (after learning Spanish and some German) because I wanted to know how all those consonants together formed words. It is much easier than German. Once you get a feel for the sounds that the letters make, many vocabulary words are similar to English words, just “Welshified”.
Why oh why are there so few audio resources in Welsh? In English there are countless audiobooks of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, modern novelists, trash fiction. Why hasn't the Welsh Language Council (or whatever it is) produced audiobooks of Welsh classics and modern fiction?
Two of my children were educated in Monmouth, then Gwent, formerly Monmouthshire. But I found it sad that my Welsh friends - who studied Welsh at school - rarely use it. One has chosen to relearn it in his 70s. If anyone reading this is Welsh and has 'moved on' in English, take it up again. I don't speak it, and live in England, but I value it for being all around me since I was a child. It is beautiful, and poetic, and a great language for telling stories. Yet, living within sight of Wales, I hear it rarely. My g-g-grandmother was Welsh, so my g-grandmother, who was half English and lived her whole life in Lancashire, always described herself as Welsh Calvinistic Methodist - by her mindset and faith. Now there's Welsh for you. She gave my grandparents a clock as a wedding present. It has kept perfect time for over a century. Clean and lubricate your Welsh language, wind it up carefully, repair it when you don't hear it, and enjoy it chiming for you.
I find the biggest difficulty with learning Welsh is getting to grips with initial consonant mutation and the two grammatical genders. On a different point, Hungarian has only two grammatical 'cases', nominative and accusative. It has suffixes in place of prepositions. These may look like case endings but if you think of them as being instead of prepositions that makes it easier.
Once you see the mutations flow with the natural spectrum of human sound, it will come easier. G - / C - Ch / G, Ng B - V(f) D - Th (Dd) T - D / Th Etc..
I'll say this as en English person learning Welsh -- It isn't without its challenges, but they are to be embraced. What I have been surprised by is now similar many of the sentence constructions are. For example: "Dw i'n mynd i ddysgu Cymraeg". I'm not aware of any other language that uses "to go" to construct a future tense. There is probably a family of languages that does it, but English and Welsh are the only two I'm aware of.
We think much of the -ing and Do / Go constructions in English came from Welsh, as they are found across the Celtic Languages and English, and not much elsewhere.
Irish-polyglot here. I think welsh is a very beautiful language and will learn it one day. By contrast, irish is more difficult than all the other ten languages i ever tried. The big advantage of learning irish ? A direct connection to the Bronze Age and maybe ideas & metaphors older than Ancient Greece. Greater links between speakers of Welsh & Irish would be ever so productive.
Here in Lagos people often test my comprehension of their local languages to see if they can speak freely in front of me without me understanding their gossip. I find the response 'Yan tan tethera pethera .... PIMP!' a useful way of communicating that I know exactly what their up to. Not exactly Welsh, but it does the job. You make a very good case. I wish I'd had the time to learn Welsh when I was younger. Not for personal advancement but more for a deeper understanding of what it means to be British.
This is very funny. Of course if you are in a group and know someone does not speak a language others do, you have an advantage over them. It is best to be nice, but also not to make the mistake of realising they actually CAN speak it and havr heard you gossiping!
Somethings are rearranged in sentence structure but generally my beginner experience thus far is pretty straight forward. Im used to trilling R and Ch sounds like in German. It's not so crazy.
Apparently duolingo welsh is incorrect, I saw a video and the guy was from north wales and said that it was southern welsh. People In the comments who were from the south said it was weird too so I'm not sure how to learn welsh. Made me even question what I learnt in school.
I am English and learning Welsh, but even though I have learned a few languages I can verify that Welsh is way harder than any of them, even German. Mutations, 50,000 ways of saying yes and no, and no obvious way of knowing the gender of nouns. My progress is slow but it’s a challenge and I won’t give up!
See my video on plural endings, and also the video on noun endings (Welsh is very regular, actually, just in a different way!). As for Yes and No, remember that the past tense is very easy. Naddo (no in the past), Do (yes in the past).
Why did you exclude 'dod' from the irregular verbs? Mynd, gwneud, cael ('get', not 'have'), and dod follow similar patterns. Bod is even more irregular than mynd, dod, gwneud, and cael. Apart from these Welsh has defective verbs like eisiau, angen, rhaid. The need for soft mutation when addressing someone is kinda a remnant of the old vocative case: Croeso blant, not *croeso plant, for instance.
I am a Mexican student of history and i have been in love since I was a child with Celtic stories and myth, but I've never felt I could actually learn any celticl language, until recently I just felt suddenly so inspired to be able to one day read the mabinogion, and id like to ask, you believe that is doable? is middle welsh very different to modern welsh, and do you know of any resources to learn it? Thanks for your work!
Middle Welsh is much closer to modern Welsh than Old English or Saxon is to English. I would suggest buying a copy of the Mabinogion in Welsh to begin and going at it very slowly word by word, if you want the Medieval stuff. And thank you.
It's been a while since I first wanted to learn Welsh, but it is kind of hard because there isn't that much material online. And when I found something, it comes to be questionable. But hey, do you know any site or something that may teach Welsh properly? By the way, great video.
Thank you / Diolch yn fawr This may help : learnwelsh.cymru/learning/digital-resources/entry/ Also, this online dictionary is essential - geiriaduracademi.org/ And Duolingo has it, as well as BBC Welsh Language News - www.bbc.co.uk/cymru
Actually, there are a lot of English words that have welsh origins either directly from Welsh itself of second hand from say French, which brings me on to my second point being that the French words didn’t come to Wales, they weren’t adopted from the French, obviously there may be some exceptions to the rule but for the general rule, the French got them from Welsh. Welsh is a very very old language, one of the oldest to still exist and English and French and Spanish etc are all much younger languages and even Latin and Greek are not as old as Welsh. Welsh is the only language still in existence, that we know of, that can translate the Egyptian hieroglyphs. You would be surprised how many English words actually have Welsh origins even those which they claim originate from other languages, it discover more and more each day. The thing that makes Welsh such an awesome language is also the thing that proves it’s the origin of these words. Welsh words are syllables combined to form a word. Some words are combinations of words, words with prefixes and suffixes, so when you reverse engineer words you essentially have a sentence as if you were trying to describe something to someone without using its name. The beauty of many Welsh words is, the have a abstract meaning and a meaning of an object and so an object, say a tree, can have a symbolic abstract meaning. If a word is adopted from another language, you can’t reverse engineer it using welsh or if you can, out of sheer coincidence, it won’t make any sense. If you can reverse engineer it then you know it’s of welsh origin. Take Bath as an example, if you look up it’s official etymology it will claim that Bath comes from Germanic origins, Baeth, Bad, but it’s actually Welsh and I will show you how we can conclude that 100% In welsh Bath would be spelt Bâdd The â is an aa so Bâdd is Baadd Break it down and you get Ba + add Ba means, a being in, immersion Add means, Impulse, effort, action So Bâdd means the action of immersing oneself, ie a Bath. You also have Bâddon which adds the welsh -on suffix to the end, with makes it plural, so Baths The battle of Badon is said to have been on hill just outside Bath and that was said to have taken place in 5th century. Dad comes from the mutation of Tad which is welsh for Father. T mutates to D Baby comes from Welsh Baban (Baby/Infant) which comes from Maban (B is mutation of M) Maban means a baby and comes from Mab+an -an suffix is the welsh equivalent of the English -y suffix, it’s a diminutive suffix Mab is a boy/son, so Maban/Baban means a little boy ie a baby Penguin is an example of the French adopting the Welsh and then it being adopted into English Guin is the French adoption of Gwyn/Gwen and Pen is Welsh Gwen being the feminine of Gwyn Gwyn being Gwy+yn suffix Cell (Cy+ell) meaning a separation, a grove or arbour, a cell, a private room Celtic is equivalent of Celtiad -ic English suffix is equivalent of welsh -iad suffix Celt+iad Celt (cêl+t) meaning a covert or shelter Celtiad meaning someone who abideth in a covert or an inhabitant of the woods, a Celt. But I won’t go into the who Celtic thing and how it’s just one big fallacy, just to say the Welsh are not and never have been Celtic. Also, Wales is actually of welsh origin not Anglo-Saxon or any of those fallacies. It doesn’t mean foreigner etc It actually comes from the welsh Gwâl which essentially means land of the Gâl (Welsh) Gwâl+es suffix makes plural, Lands of the Gâl In welsh the mutation of G is to drop the G, so Gwâles becomes Wales, Yr Wales, the lands of the Gâl Which is what Wales is known as by many Countries Eg Pays de Galles - French (lands of the Galles) Gales - Portuguese Gales - Basque Gal-les - Catalan Galles - Corsican Gales - Galician Galles - Italian Tara Galilor - Romanian (the country of the Gal) Gales - Spanish Gal Ulkesi - Turkish (Country of the Gal) Galler - Turkish The Welsh from Britain (Gâl) spread down to Europe and they became known as the Gaul but again, that’s a whole other story, it’s all part of the persecution of the Welsh and why the welsh language was attacked and why they wanted to nuke the language from existence, because it holds the key to understanding the true history
For centuries Anglo-centric linguists and historians have been building a myth almost nothing in English came from Welsh. This was at root a falsehood to feel superior to the native culture as immigrants.
My dad was Welsh - but was never taught it at school My grandparents on his side - nain and taid, as their titles suggest, were NORTH Welsh. The pronunciation and dialect in the North is different from the South and it is parts of the North that still speaks it everyday. Phonetics has little going for it (!) as the Northeners often say it differently. In any case, the everyday Southern Welsh is not the same as academic Welsh either! Ach y fy!
The word "Welsh" is Old English for "Foreign Slave". Why are 3 million Britons still referred to as Foreign Slaves 1500 years later? No public discussion of this racist insult whatsoever!
I wouldn't say Welsh is incredibly easy with it's mutations, proliferation of 2 & 1 letter pronouns,articles and qualifiers. It can be a little tricky at the beginning but once you get used to them they are a lot of fun. Welsh is a quirky language with a lot of little unexpected twists and turns,but it is also a awesome language once start getting the hang of it. It is highly mutable but consistent at the same time. It's orthography is exceptionally phonetic and doesn't really need an IPA of it's own as the alphabet is well suited to the language. I studied a little Japanese, Sanskrit, Hebrew and by far Welsh is my favourite. When you speak Welsh you use every muscle in your tongue and mouth. You really know your speaking a foreign language with Cymraeg.Hywl fawr.👍🏴
Out of curiosity do you know of any good sources for learning Old Welsh? I've had a passing interest for some time but never knew where to start. My Welsh teacher used to tell us about how Welsh might be the oldest written language in Europe, but we never had source materials for Old Welsh.
You best bet is to begin with Late Middle Welsh, and work your way backwards slowly. Start with being able to read something like Y Bardd Cwsg by Ellis Wynne from 1703. Once you can read that easily, try the early Welsh Carols and Poets of the 1600s. Then the Bible of 1588.
Cael would actually be more correctly translated as 'to get' rather than 'to have'. If you say rwy'n cael arian it means I am getting money not I have money. You can say Rwy'n cael arian poced ar y penwythnos but if you mean you have money in your pocket you have to say Mae arian gen i (North Wales) or Mae arian gyda fi (South Wales)
No language is easy. The biggest thing for the Welsh language and its spread is that it's a Duolingo language. That's fantastic. Any smaller language that wants more speakers and more interest can only dream of being a Duolingo language. 675,000 active learners now, I read somewhere. And it's not a bad-size course either, not to compare with their Spanish or French, of course, but it's got 75 Units - comfortably a year and a half of content if you take a Unit a week. Hindi only has 27 Units and Arabic has 36! Anyhow, here am I, an Englishman, looking in Duolingo and thinking, "The language right on my doorstep, part of our island history, why have I never thought of this before?" and launched in. Despite this video, I am *not* expecting to be functional even at the most basic of levels for a long long time to come, and certainly not solely through Duolingo. But I hope to be in it for the long haul - wish me luck!
There is one problem in learning Welsh, and that is the opportunity to use the language, I am a Welsh learner, but in seven years living in Wales , I have never been addressed in Welsh,which I find very sad, even a last year's eisteddfod everyone I spoke to used English, I hope this changes in the future as I believe it is already being addressed in schools .
Is wasn't just the Welsh who were restricted to using a specific alphabet when printing, the English were also forced since the printing press was made in Germany so we lost certain letters from our original alphabet
@@BenLlywelyn I can't find any evidence that the Welsh were restricted from using their own writing system, only that the printing press had to be signed off by the queen which to me sounds like a general censorship.
The irony is you saying "it's not like with Mongolian" & here I am having just decided to start learning Welsh...whilst I'm also learning Mongolian. Though some Welsh pronunciation is a good gateway into understanding Mongolian pronunciation, they do share a couple of features, which is kind of interesting considering how isolated from each other they are. But one of the things making me question juggling the languages like that is the attention they'll need from me. There are people saying Welsh is one of the hardest languages, using the metric of how long it takes (which puts it on par with Mongolian), which to me is not a good metric because 300 easy things may take longer to learn than 50 difficult things. So this does kind of reassure me on my choice to do a "major/minor" approach to focus my priorities.
Mongolian, being aggutinative, written with a different alphabet and from a completely different root from Indo-European would be far harder a language for an English speaker to learn than Welsh - which has a massive amount of English vocabulary and culturally related context.
@@BenLlywelyn Aye and I agree. This is why I think ranking difficulty based on time it takes to learn is not a good metric. I think from a study (based on info I could find) it was saying Welsh would take around 1040 hours to learn, which almost puts it in Category III of the Language difficulty rankings for English speakers (1100 hours), which houses Mongolian & Vietnamese (I can speak Vietnamese to an intermediate level). And what you're saying about Welsh as an indoeuropean language neighbouring England...there's an awful lot of ground already covered. Which I didn't with Vietnamese & don't with Mongolian. But then, this is why I look for things like this video instead of relying on a metric that doesn't tell the whole story. And I find it makes my decision reassuring.
thanks ben, that is encouraging - i'm thinking of downsizing to llandudno in the future, what do you think i'll find/ will the locals accept us (i live nr oxford at present) as i'm southern english and what do you reckon the health service will be like there? if you can have a stab at an answer i'd appreciate it.
Our health service in Wales is in a bad shape largely because we have so many retirees move here. That is just the truth, sorry if it offense, but you did ask.
3:41 Azerbaijani has 6 cases 😂 That's a big struggle to teach my students German and try to make them understand it also can be done with just 4 😂😭 \/w\/
Yes definitely feels familiar (family) in many ways. Do we know what the language of Wales was like 2000 years ago or during the reign of Coel Hen..... Have any old bardic poems been handed down somewhere, I know they were not written down back then... There are genealogies that go back to Bran and Branwen and Llyr.....was anything written on graves or ?
We have quite a bit. The Book of Taliesin, and The Gododdin, and Welsh Law texts. But those are copies of older texts made 500 years later. The pre-Roman Language would be familiar in places but with a case system and core Indo-Euro vocabulary, unintelligable to a Welsh speaker.
As someone with English as their native language I see Welsh as being easier than Spanish. I am actually learning Welsh as to make for the fact that I can't really get Irish done right so far and I thought I would try learning it since I am of Irish decent yet my surname is English because my father was adopted. I also did one of those DNA test to find out my ethnic blood the result was Irish-English-German-Scottish-French-Greek-Swedish-Norwegian and Finnish so I decided to go try to learn all those languages and so far German is the easiest yet the language I decided to add in even though it is not a part of my ethnic blood is because I would use it as a substitute for Galidge or as a language to get a better grasp of Irish and then to work on it and have more success. Nos da is goodnight in Welsh. Draig is Dragon. Noswaight dda is good evening. Prynhawn da is good afternoon. P.S:I know the Irish drink more tea than the English side of the United Kingdom and also that the Irish are not really that alcoholic compared to the English.I can also name every province of Ireland being Munster,Connacht,Ulster and Leinister. I also don't call myself Irish when I am just an American who just happens to have their DNA yet I do copy the Irish a tiny bit in regards to their Paddy caps and refusing to call Saint Patrick's Day Saint Paddys day along with not really caring for Lucky Charms.
Lucky Charms are bad for your health. As a Texan originally, Spanish is quite easy for me, but I had deep and familial exposure early on which makes a difference. Compared to Scots Gaelic and Irish, however, I found Welsh to be much smoother and pleasurable - but that it my own personal opinion.
@@jamburga321 yep and there is a reason i don't care for Romance languages because they make people sound a bit ridiculous when spoken with them only sounding good when sung.
Why cant we have a standard welsh with elements of each dialects i am a leaner of welsh. also we can make f - v and ff - f then dd for dh and always showing long vowels. also as a hindi speaker i find welsh easy.
@@BenLlywelyn in india we have standard of all languages but its only to written but we speak with our dialect words and with highly technical terms like reaction in hindi we use prëtikrziya. so others get it.
Welsh is not easy to learn for an English speaker. It will take thousands of hours of study and thousands of hours of listening to get fluent. A huge amount of work is needed to learn the vocabulary, and in languages most verbs don’t map one to one to an English verb, you need to learn the deep meaning. Then there are expressions, turns of phrase, two genders, different ways to form a plural, mutations and the singular and plural second person i.e. thou and you. It is a very pleasant language to hear, and fairly easy for an English speaker to pronounce. I don’t recommend Duolingo, having spent eight months with it for French and a few months for German. It is a very poor way to learn a language. That isn’t how we learn. If you can, find short stories for beginners on RU-vid, listen to them and read the transcript. Gradually get used to the language, pick it up slowly, words will sink in. A short course might help to introduce the concepts.
@@BenLlywelyn I should add that I can now understand scientific lectures in French with ease, and also most podcasts, thanks to using comprehensible input. Oh, and well done with your Welsh, I wish I spoke it as I know some speakers.
I'm not sure that my English ancestors didn't adopt Welsh words because of hatred of the Welsh any more than my Welsh ancestors adopted English words because of love for the English. It's probably a matter of opportunity and convenience.
We have dozens of religious texts atracking the Britons and their Language, we also have Saxon Laws. As for your family, I cannot possibly say and assume they were good people out of good faith toward you.
I'm in New Zealand. There don't seem to be any effective language learning tools here for Welsh. We cannot access Welsh tv or a real online course . There's nothing but books you can order in and things like duolingo which I found a waste of time for me personally or the odd youtube video but no thorough course. You probably have great facilities for learning Welsh if you're in the UK but worldwide not so much.
If you're in New Zealand, it may be more appropriate to learn Maori. I spent 4 years in NZ, I remember that children song to learn few Maori words: "Ma is white, whero is red, kakariki green (etc.)
Yes, there are quite a few resources. Try LearnWelsh.Cymru, and also check out this - if dated but very useful site - www.bbc.co.uk/wales/learning/learnwelsh/ Also you can get news here golwg.360.cymru/newyddion and learn by clicking the 'VOCAB' button up in the top bar which lets you scroll over words and see what it is in English.
Brythonic was basically Welsh without any Latin and with a case system and more agglutinative forms. See my video on agglutinative languages if you are curious about what that means. Early Welsh was borderline agglutinative and is a fusional language today like French and Hebrew.
In comparison, Norweigian isn't any simpler! It's actually very complex. It has irregular pronounciation, unneeded silent letters, more exceptions than rules to spelling and words with sounds that have no letter. Meaning that there are words in Norweigian that sound as if it had an extra letter. Take a look at Norweigian "Detektiv" pronounced Dektektiv as if it had an extra K. Norweigian language is just unphonetic and irregular in spelling/pronounciation. It's not written like it's pronounced. There are also many silent letters, espeically D or H. There are also many ambiguous letters/combos like G, K or SK. Oh! And not to mention, we also have many overlapping sounds (ex: Soft K vs Tj vs Kj, Soft G vs J vs Gj, etc). Norweigian is just as bad as English.
Breton actually has a fair number of speakers compared to other Celtic languages. According to the Wikipedia page about Celtic languages, Breton is the 2nd spoken Celtic language, after Welsh. That said, the number of Breton speakers has been declining. There are more kids learning Breton nowadays in Schools then when I was kids. So there is hope.
Most people still spoke Breton in Brittany until early in the XX-th century, so long after the French Revolution. What caused the decline of Breton was the 1st world war (when males had to go away from Brittany for the war and discovered the rest of France) and mostly the systematic humiliation of children in schools that spoke Breton rather French in the first half of the XX century. That "worked so well", that an entire generation felt ashamed of themselves for speaking Breton. When that generation of children became adults, they decided to not transmit Breton to their children to avoid the same humiliation they experienced. Only in the 70's did Breton people realized what they lost something important by not transmitting Breton and learning Breton then became cool, but mostly a minority of sufficiently motivated and often educated people. I was a child in the 70's and when I was going to my grandma in the countryside, I could hear Breton spoken by many old people, including my grandmother that spoke it natively and who only learned French later in life. I did not speak it myself as a kid, but I could hear it often. My grandma made mistakes in French by doing literal translation from Breton e.g. "Du café vous aurez ?" (similar to the word order "Kafe ho po"? in Breton). Now there are schools in Breton or in a mix of Breton and French, so there is some hope.
The Welsh verb is hundreds of times less complex than the Spanish verb. You can't completely mater the Spanish verb in 10 hours of class time like you can with the Welsh language! Why is this? All that has to be done is learn the conjugations for one verb, the verb to be! I am screaming at the tele= dw i'n sgrechian ar y teledu. you will be screaming at the tele = byddi di'n sgrechian ar y teledu. She was screaming at the tele = Roedd hi'n sgrechian ar y teledu. English does this same thing with its verbs, somethings. Welsh does it all the time. Simple.
@Ben Llewelyn Bore da! You might have forgotten 1 good reason, mate. I am not a 100% if amongst the Celtic languages it is the ONLY one, but, but there is in Welsh.... 🥁🥁🥁... 🥁🥁🥁🥁... P-O-R-N !!! LOL. Serious. A Welsh language teacher and pal told that to me about a tape of a couple speaking Cymraeg during a roll in the hay. i never found that video, but I found better! A fairly recent one with 2 Welsh men, a Czech woman and a Welshwoman none other than Stacy Saran in a shop. of course it's not only in Welsh but they tell several phrases. On a previous porn video Stacy Saran says on Welsh phrase or two in a pub with Ben Dover. Amongst the endangered languages having porn is a good sign of survibility, I reckon. Never found porn in Brezhoneg or Gaeilge yet sadly. Greetings Ô Wlad Belg. Iechy da
I like your arguments. But … please, you and everyone else, stop taking about “a phonetic language”! ALL languages are phonetic-they have sounds. What you mean is “has a phonetically based writing system”. Language and writing system are not the same thing.
