I've got to wade through documents today that are twice as long as they need to be because they're written in English and Welsh!
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How many Welsh people can't read and speak English?
(33 posts) (15 voices)
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medici2471
offlineMemberPosted 10 months ago # -
waylandsmithy
offlineMemberOnly about a fifth of those living in Wales can speak welsh, whereas nigh-on 100% can speak english.
That does make me wonder why they bother making programmes in Welsh, it seems rather bloody-minded.
We occasionally have roadsigns with welsh splattered all over them cropping up in Cheshire. Completely bloody useless, and harder to spot the important words quickly.
Posted 10 months ago # -
beau-jolly
offlineMember@Medic. Presumably you will only wade through the English bits in which case it is the same size. How will you be able to tell if the Welsh document says the same thing or whether it is a load of complete bobbins?
@Wayland: Are all the road signs near the yoghurt factory still in Polish?
@any one interested. There's a golf club just over the border near Wrexham. The sign says "Golf" underneath which, in case the Welsh can't understand, is written "Golff".
Posted 10 months ago # -
medici2471
offlineMember -
beau-jolly
offlineMemberTo be fair, no-one is going to actually read the Welsh bit though are they?
Posted 10 months ago # -
Ironduke
offlineMemberI love the desperation to have a Welsh version of modern terms / inventions.
Computer being 'compiwtor' for instance. No attempt to replicate the root derivation- the translation of 'compute' is 'cyfrif', so you might reasonably expect 'cyfrifiadur' as the general term for 'computer'...but instead they just change a letter or two to make it look a bit Welsh and go with the word that sounds the same. Why bother? The English language doesn't feel belittled by adopting 'savoir-faire' or 'carpe diem', so why can't Welsh either fully and properly translate or just borrow and adopt without fiddling?
Posted 10 months ago # -
Ironduke
offlineMemberand as for educating children in Welsh language schools...why rear them with a mother tongue that restricts their circle of understanding to 500,000 people when our world is shrinking and wider communication is becoming so much more important? By all means offer it as a novelty topic, or evening classes for adults interested to keep it alive...but are any of those children actually going to be better off fluent in Welsh rather than Spanish or French?
At one stage we were looking to relocate and would have strongly considered Wales if it wasn't for our children having to learn Welsh at school...I wonder how many other immigrants Wales is losing out on because of their blinkered language policy?Posted 10 months ago # -
The All New Jeni B
offlineMemberId, I think you've just found the solution to the problems of immigration.
If we insist that all immigrants to the UK are required by law to master not just English, but Welsh, Gaelic, Irish, and that weird Cornwall thing, then immigration would fall away to, well, not much very quickly.
Posted 10 months ago # -
Thor
offlineMemberAmazingly, it seems 25% of them can’t read in any language, presumably because all the clever ones move to England the first chance they get:
http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/2010/10/11/25-of-people-in-wales-still-illiterate-55578-27446591/
Explains a lot.Posted 10 months ago # -
Clementine
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Posted 10 months ago # -
Ironduke
offlineMemberThor, Wayland...you guys need to talk to each other. Its really simple to see whats happened here.
The Welsh people running Waylands study found that c. 25% of people in Wales spoke Welsh, and could answer their questions.
The English people running Thor's study found that c. 25% of people became so distressed at their illiteracy that when questioned they could only communicate in strangled, gurgling, nonsensical guttural wails of distress.
Posted 10 months ago # -
Welsh is a beautiful language, if you can get to learn it (a bit, as I did).
No, they're not setting anagrams on road signs.
I think the reason the signs (and documents) are bilingual is that they are being nice to the English, despite the facts of history that we clearly don't deserve it.
In Welsh there is no 'v' in the alphabet so that value is given to "f" and for the English "f" the Welsh spell it "ff".
Also "w" is a vowel and pronounced "oo"
Cymru am byth!
Posted 10 months ago # -
Scroat
offlineMemberEnglish is obviously the lingua franca (which as a term, is a joke) but as language us such an integral part of culture, Welsh, Gaelic, Cornish etc. should all be encouraged. Once they've gone, they have gone forever.
Also important not to confuse the numbers of Welsh speakers with the geographical spread of the language.
Have a thing about Gaelic - what's spoken never seems to bear any relation to the way it's written. A bit of a worry that one.
Posted 10 months ago # -
waylandsmithy
offlineMemberScroat, Cornish had gone, but then a load of awkward, bloody-minded scholarly types decided to force it back to make some point about being 'different' and 'clever'.
Did the English build the Babel Tower for nothing? Was Brunel not cheered by the welsh, when he freed them from the shackles of a language with only nine words in it?
Posted 10 months ago # -
The All New Jeni B
offlineMemberMy maiden-name was Evans, despite the Welsh link being tenuous at best, but pride ourselves on our complete inability to do a convincing Welsh accent.
Clearly, whichever ancestor of ours left the valleys went via Hyderabad, taking in Kingston, Jamaica, and having a stopover in Galway before making it to Dundee.
Posted 10 months ago #
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