Musings about words in Welsh and English

I've been musing about how words translate (or not) between Welsh and English - and how different the literal meanings are. One of my interests is wildlife and so I have found myself looking up the Welsh names of animals and birds especially. Sometimes they are close to the English, (Like blackbird) but at other times they are interestingly different. So, like in Ennglish, some of the names are descriptive -but focus on a different kind of description - hence Oystercatcher becomes Pioden y mor; (sea magpie) and thrush is Bronfraith (which I think is speckled breast) and the chough (where does that word come from??) becomes Bran coed goch - nicely straightforward as this means crow with red legs! (which can be seen in the picture and are much more common in Wales than in England).
Then there are words or phrases that are much more concise than in English in two senses. A) in the sense that there is one Welsh word for several in English. Examples here are – betws (grove of birch trees, so one dictionary says); echddoe – day before yesterday; echnos (night before last) . Quite helpful to have one word for this I think. And b) a kind of conciseness where one word is used where there are two in Englishb – e.g. dysgu (teach and learn) or menthyg (lend and borrow) and the precise meaning is worked out from the sentence . (and the marks of these can be seen in Welsh speakers who often use lend or borrow for either – not surprisingly)

Then there are also just interesting and fascinating words or phrases. I was watching a countryside programme and wondered what the reference to ceffyl wedd meant literally - it was clearly what we would call a heavy or work horse, and it turnns out that wedd means yoke - so it means yoke horse. Annd there are so many words for toad that I don't know which if any is the most commonly used. I don't remember the word from our childhood - we probably used llyffant (frog) for both - but apparantely toad can be "llyfant dafad" which initially looks like it is a sheep frog - but further enquiries reveal that dafad also means warty - so that makes sense

Dim llawer o Gymraeg yng Nghymru (not much Welsh in Wales)

Well I'm having problems synchronising and therefore putting mp3 files onto my PDA - so no Welsh on the move for me at the moment - not on the bike anyway. I have spent a few days walking on the Cambrian way in South Wales though. Lovely walking but quite disappointing in tersm of not bumping into ANY Welsh speakers, really. Now I know that there are not so many in those counties but I thojught we might have found a few - S4C must get its speakers from somewhere (they are not all South Waleians). Even so I was really interested to walk in an area of Wales I had never been to - except one trip to a Rugby match in Cardiff on a coach when around 17..................
We walked from Cardiff to Abergavenny over four days.

I felt that as I was in Wales I did need to do some Welsh hence kept up my walk diary in Welsh - so far it is just in a note book but I think that soon I need to be brave and start bloggin in Welsh. I have been looking at other Welsh blogs and have found some fascinating ones: more on that in a future post. But now I am back from my walk and without mobile resources am back to reading. The book I have completed most recently is William Jones by T Rowland Hughes. As with O Law i Law this is a somewhat abbreviated edition, with some notes for Welsh learners. But I think I am getting to the point where I might try the original (bit scary, though). Anyway, as with O Law i Law this is a fascinating and humorous story about a slate quarrier who decides to move to the "Sowth": that being South Wales - which enables the story to provide a commentary on the hardships, comradery annd humour of the South Wales mines (from the perspective of a North Walian) at a time of depression and unemployment. What I find fascinating about the books I have been reading from around this period - which includes Kate Roberts' work too is the social history, and moreover, a social history that feels as though it has a strong personal connection. Roberts, as I have said before was born in the same village as my father, whilst Hughes lived in Llanberis, a village some 7 miles away.

Learning on the move again

In my regular emails from the BBC learnwelsh website, I received one about the recent Welsh podcasts. So far, there aren’t too many: one which seems to be the equivalent of Radio 4’s Pick of the week (pretty good); another which is a nature programme (fine - another interest) and a third which is a very light magazine program with a bit too much focus on celebrities I have never heard of. Nevertheless, this looks like giving me, once again, a resource I can use whilst cycling, thus making good use of the 80 mins or so a day when I cycle in and out of work.

Interesting to reflect on how what I use to resource and support my Welsh activities is serendipitous – depending on what resources I have managed to procure recently or what new resources have come to my attention. What I am using changes my pattern of learning quite a lot. The podcasta are quite timely as I have just finished Hari Potter. Yes, it is spelt correctly - it is a Welsh version of Harry Potter, bought when in Abergavenny in March – and have found it, as with the BFG I read previously, to be a really motivating resource. Sad, you might think, but the fact is that the story is quite a page turner – and I can keep reading it in Welsh with only occasionally recourse to either the dictionary , or, better, the English version. So children’s books seem to be good (if well written) for extending vocabulary whilst maintaining a good narrative that pulls you along. (Though of course some of the language in Harry Potter is quite specialist – not sure how useful all the words involved in Quidditch will be, if I ever remember them)