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#Cymraeg
llyfrenfys · 17 hours
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Y llyfr heddiw yw 'Forbidden Lives' gan Norena Shopland, a gyhoeddwyd yn 2017.
Mae'r llyfr hwn yn gasgliad o hanes LHDTC+ Cymru. Mae'n un o'r ychydig lyfrau ar y testun Cymru a pobl LHDTC+ (fel Llyfr y Dydd ddoe ac echdoe!). Mae'r ysgrifen Shopland yn goeth a manwl iawn. Mae hi'n defnyddio ei hymchwil yn y llyfr i ddangos hanes bobl LHDTC+ aneglur, fel Edith Gertude Phillips (g. 1886). Mae Shopland yn disgrifio hanes pobl LHDTC+ nodedig fel y Eleanor Butler a Sarah Ponsonby, hefyd.
Mae'r llyfr hwn yn un o fy hoff lyfrau!
Ydych chi wedi darllen y llyfr hwn?
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Today's book is 'Forbidden Lives' by Norena Shopland, published in 2017.
This book is a compilation of Welsh LGBTQ+ history. It is one of the few books on the subject of Wales and LGBTQ+ people (like the Book of the Day yesterday and the day before yesterday!). Shopland's writing is exquisite and very detailed. She uses her research to show the history of less well-known LGBTQ+ people, such as Edith Gertude Phillips (b. 1886). Shopland describes the history of more well-known LGBTQ+ people also.
This book is one of my favourite books!
Have you read this book?
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stephanidftba · 15 days
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I figured the Jolene loving site needed to see this
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daianotherday · 11 months
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I'd love to bask in this and laugh my arse off at the disconnect between the propaganda and the actual feeling of people, but ...
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How long are we going to tolerate this?
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haruwuchiyoo · 4 months
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Fantasy authors stop using Irish/Gaeilge, Scots Gaelic/Gàidhlig and Welsh/Cymraeg in your books if you're going to miserably mispronounce them and then say "well this is just MY pronunciation of it!" when you're called out. That's not how that works. Gaeilge, Scots Gaelic and Welsh are three languages that were dangerously teetering on becoming "dead languages" because English occupation intentionally crippled them to suppress the chances of rebellion in three countries they colonized. Native languages that were banned and beaten out of people. I hate this trend, it's tacky. If you're going to use our languages to sound whimsical, learn how to pronounce them correctly, it's the absolute bare minimum. The Celtic languages aren't some little fun trendy devices to bolster and make your books more interesting.
Our languages do sound great in fantasy novels. They're beautiful and frankly magical when spoken fluently, and it's incredibly sad that although they are recovering, they still have an incredibly long way to go.
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nightbringer24 · 1 year
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A growing interest in the Welsh language and culture could mean Cymraeg is no longer classed as being "vulnerable to extinction," according to a new report. Preply's Endangered Language Report says an increase in the number of people wanting to learn Welsh could help the Welsh Government realise its ambition of one million Welsh speakers by 2050.
Welsh is integral to the country's heritage and national identity but a decline in the number of Welsh speakers had put it at risk of extinction in recent years. It is one of Britain's oldest languages but historical events such as the Act of Uniformity in 1549 (where all acts of worship were to be conducted in English), have impacted its growth dramatically.
The infamous ‘Welsh Not’ signs of the 1800s which were designed to punish school children for speaking Welsh are just one example of numerous attempts to extinguish the language throughout history. Despite this, Welsh remains widely spoken in homes, schools, and workplaces across the country and interest in the language is on the rise.
Saw this on my phone yesterday morning and forgot to share it.
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mouth-almighty · 6 months
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Ynys Môn am byth!
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mwg-drwg · 1 year
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This is a funny sign and all but I think the main takeaway should be that there is Dog English and Dog Welsh (Cimraeg?!?!?!?)
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crynwr-drwg · 1 year
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I don't remember if I ever shared this before, but I found it again (in my camera roll)
It translates to "No Music On A Dead Planet" and it was outside the castle in Cardiff by Bute parc (a while ago it was, at least)
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queerwelsh · 11 months
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Pride in Wales! Balchder yng Nghymru!
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Here’s a list of the Pride events happening in Wales this year, in 2023. (click the links for more information)
Dyma rhestr o ddigwyddiadau Balchder yng Nghymru blwyddyn yma, yn 2023.
22 April/Ebrill - Aberystwyth Pride / Balchder yn Aberystwyth
29 April/Ebrill - Swansea Pride / Balchder Abertawe
30 April/Ebrill - Mini Pride and Swansea Anti-Capitalist Pride (1pm Singleton Park)  / Balchder Bach a Balchder Gwrthgyfalafol Abertawe (1yp Parc Singleton)
14 May/Mai - Colwyn Bay Pride / Balchder Bae Colwyn
17 June/Mehefin - Hay Pride
17 June/Mehefin - The Big Queer Picnic
17-18 June/Mehefin - Cardiff Pride / Balchder Caerdydd (Pride Cymru)
19 June/Mehefin - Cowbridge Pride / Balchder y Bontfaen
24 June/Mehefin - Caerphilly Pride / Balchder Caerffili
24 June/Mehefin - Abergavenny Pride
24 June/Mefefin - Balchder Gogledd Cymru / North Wales Pride Caernarfon
29 June/Mehefin - 2 July/Gorffennaf - Balchder Neath Port Talbot Pride
8 July/Gorffennaf - Llandeilo Pride / Balchder Llandeilo
15 July/Gorffennaf - Llanelli Pride / Balchder Llaneilli
29 July/Gorffennaf - Llandovery Pride / Balchder Llanymddyfri
12 August/Awst - Barry Pride / Balchder y Barri
12 August/Awst - Balchder Glitter Pride Cardiff
26 August/Awst - Merthyr Tydfil Pride / Balchder Merthyr Tudful
2 September/Medi - Pride in the Port Newport / Balchder Casnewydd
9-10 September/Medi - RCT Pride
15-17 September/Medi - Trans Pride Cardiff
16 September/Medi - Carmarthen Pride/Balchder Caerfyrddin
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karmagotme · 5 months
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It's been announced that DuoLingo will stop updating Welsh courses. They've always championed endangered languages in the past but articles say they want to focus more on popular languages like Spanish and French. The following is a link to a petition to get the First Minister of Wales to work with the DuoLingo CEO and get them to save the course.
As someone who is learning Welsh, it's devastating news. Yes, there is still Say Something in Welsh and other methods, but DuoLingo is also extremely helpfull, especially for anyone who may not be able to afford all of the later courses in SSIW.
So please, signage would be most appreciated.
EDIT: Please don't think you have to live in Wales to sign this! I signed and I live in Australia. Share this with your language-learning friends around the world!
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totalspiffage · 10 months
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Mis Balchder Hapus! / Happy Pride Month!
Here's a wonderful little Welsh lesson covering key lgbt vocabulary by bfdavies on TikTok.
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llyfrenfys · 8 months
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I'd like to preface this with that this is a screenshot of a post I saw a few days ago in the #welsh tag and that the OP has since deleted this post, but the sentiment is something I'd like to address since I see a lot of parallels with this kind of thinking in other contexts, such as in LGBTQIA+ rights conversations.
So, the most obvious elephant in the room is the idea that Welsh is super widely spoken in Wales now and that it isn't in as much danger as other Celtic languages. This idea is wishful thinking at best and erases the very real danger that Welsh is in and that it could be lost just as easily as Irish or Scottish Gaelic. Cornish (which is related to Welsh) actually did die out and has had to be revived. To make a metaphor out of this, we classify languages on a scale of non-threatened to endangered in a similar way to how we classify species.
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Here are the statuses of Welsh and Irish as of 2010 (above) and the statuses of Lions and Tigers (below).
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On paper tigers are more 'in danger' than lions. But that does not mean that lions are suddenly not in danger at all. The little bracket above CR, EN and VU labels all of these classifications as threatened. It isn't (and definitely shouldn't) be a competition of 'who is most in danger' because you do not want the thing you care about (whether it be a species or a language) to be in danger.
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To come back to the original screenshot "they* [Welsh speakers] have always had the means and the ways because the English didn't beat or slaughter them for speaking it"- on the most basic of levels, this is just incorrect. The Welsh Not was a wooden token hung around schoolchildren's necks if they spoke Welsh in school. If someone else spoke Welsh the Not would be hung around their neck. At the end of the school day, whoever was wearing the Not would be beaten and caned by their teachers. I needn't go into much detail but there have been concerted efforts to beat Welsh out of schoolchildren. With the lions vs tigers metaphor, making the claim Welsh speakers have never been beaten for speaking Welsh because they always had the means and ways, while Irish speakers were beaten and never had the means or ways is like claiming poachers have never shot lions, only tigers. Bottom line is, lions and tigers are both victim to poaching and both species have suffered as a result. Similarly, Welsh and Irish have both suffered language loss and both need conservation efforts in order to survive.
(*sidenote- the consistent use of 'them' and 'they' in the original post is definitely indicative of a 'us vs them' sentiment which is a deeply unhelpful attitude to have when it comes to endangered languages and the Celtic languages in particular)
I see parallels with LGBTQIA+ rights in this situation. When equal marriage came in for gay and lesbian couples in the UK in 2014, many allies began to act like gay rights had now been achieved and that gay issues had been done, they're solved. Except, they really weren't (and aren't). Progress has been made in Wales and undeniably Welsh is doing the best out of the living Celtic languages. But that doesn't mean Welsh has been saved or that full equality for Welsh speakers has been achieved. It very much hasn't. The sentiment of the post in the screenshot is not conducive to helping Irish or Scottish Gaelic. Putting down Welsh speakers and erasing Welsh-language history will not save Irish or Scottish Gaelic. Pretending Welsh has had it easy in some kind of lap of luxury is a deeply harmful and bogus claim.
I'll address the tags under the cut as this post is getting long.
To address the tags, personal feelings ≠ an accurate reading of a situation. Nor is it praxis, for that matter. Why is pride in Welsh different/less good than pride in Irish? Is it the assumed proximity to England? If so, that's a terrible claim to make. Not only that, but Scotland is also next to England- does that make pride in Scottish Gaelic the same as pride in Welsh according to this metric? It's a ludicrous thing to say and deeply insensitive to the needs of Scottish Gaelic and Welsh speakers, who cannot help any current or former proximity to England.
Additionally, proximity to England ≠ worse. I know it's a popular internet joke to hate on England because of English attempts to eradicate the Celtic languages, but when the joke becomes praxis, it does not help. England ≠ a place devoid of Celtic languages either. Many English counties near the Welsh border actually have communities of Welsh speakers, such as Oswestry (Croesoswallt) in Shropshire. Cornwall is also home to many speakers of revived Cornish. It does a disservice to Celtic speakers in England to insinuate that proximity to England taints or corrupts them somehow. This is how ethnonationalism starts and we ain't about that.
And "#it feels a little.... blehhhhh you were seen as sophisticated and english enough and you assimilated however the Irish and the Scots? #brutish animals that need to be culled". So, this is arguably one of the worst things to say about a Celtic language- or any threatened language in general. First of all, the 'you were seen as' - 'you' is very telling. The switch from 'them', 'they' to 'you' indicates that this sentiment is aimed at Welsh speakers directly. This was likely a subconscious thing that OP wasn't thinking about when they wrote this. But it does indicate unhealthy feelings of jealousy and bitterness unfairly directed at Welsh speakers, who are also struggling. This righteous anger at the decline of Irish and Scottish Gaelic would be better directed at efforts to help promote those languages- some useful things to get involved with are LearnGaelic, similar to DysguCymraeg but for Scottish Gaelic or supporting channels such as Irish channel TG4 by watching their programmes.
The idea that Welsh speakers were or are 'sophisticated and english enough' is insulting and carries with it a lot of baggage of how any of these assumptions came about. Welsh speakers were definitely not seen as sophisticated. Where Welsh was 'tolerated', it was treated as a curiosity, a relic of a bygone age. Classic museification which all Celtic languages and cultures suffer from as well. Welsh was not tolerated in any legal sense since 1535- with English becoming the only valid administrative language and the language of Welsh courts after England annexed Wales into its Kingdom. Monolingual Welsh speakers suddenly had no access to any legal representation, unless they learned English. This is no voluntary assimilation- it is an act of survival for many speakers of minoritised languages to 'assimilate' into the dominant culture, or else risk losing access to legal security and other kinds of infrastructure. You need only ask any non-native English speaker living in an Anglophone country what that process is like. Welsh people did not see English incursion as an opportunity to become 'sophisticated and english enough', they had to assimilate in order to survive.
The "Irish and the Scots? #brutish animals that need to be culled" is also painfully misrepresenting a very complex social and political process that unfolded over the span of hundreds of years. The phrasing itself of 'brutish animals that need to be culled' speaks to righteous anger at the damage done to these languages and cultures, but it reinforces negative stereotypes about the Irish and Scots themselves. It also is more complicated than a simple English hatred of anything non-Anglo, since the English conception of particularly the Irish changed a lot over the centuries. It was (and still is) rarely consistent with itself. See: the enemy is both strong and weak. The very earliest Celticists were by and large, Anglos or French.
Ernest Renan (1823-1892) for example, was an early French Celticist who published La Poésie des races celtiques (Poetry of the Celtic Races- English translation) in which he says:
"... we must search for the explanation of the chief features of the Celtic character. It has all the failings, and all the good qualities, of the solitary man; at once proud and timid, strong in feeling and feeble in action, at home free and unreserved, to the outside world awkward and embarrassed. It distrusts the foreigner, because it sees in him a being more refined than itself, who abuses its simplicity. Indifferent to the admiration of others, it asks only one thing, that it should be left to itself. It is before all else a domestic race, fitted for family life and fireside joys. In no other race has the bond of blood been stronger, or has it created more duties, or attached man to his fellow with so much breadth and depth"
Yeah. This guy (unsurprisingly) was a white supremacist. Note that this sentiment is being applied to all people considered Celtic by Renan- Irish, Welsh, Breton, Scottish, Cornish, Manx etc. None unscathed by the celtophobia of the day. In this period, Celticity was romanticised (yet disparaged at the same time). It is less 'brutish animals' and more 'archaic, time-frozen peoples' in this period. Of course, 'brutish animals' attitudes towards Celticity did still exist, but it is disingenuous to act as if it was this attitude alone which drove English celtophobia. Like many things, it is always more complicated and never clear cut as it might seem.
I'll bring this to a close shortly, but returning to OP's suggestion that the Welsh assimilated and the Scots and Irish did not, is also incorrect in that some Scots did have to assimilate to survive as well. The Statutes of Iona (1609) required Scottish Gaelic speaking Highland chiefs to send their sons away to be educated in Scots and/or English in Protestant schools. Many did as the statutes required, which led to further language loss in the Highlands of Scottish Gaelic. These are acts of survival- and not ones always taken willingly.
This has been a long post but it's one which I felt I wanted to address. There's no need for infighting between speakers of Celtic languages over who has it worse. There isn't any answer to that question, nor is it a good use of time or energy. All in all, the Celtic languages have suffered greatly over the years and its only just now that some of them are turning a corner. If you care about these languages, put your energy into something good. Only through active work will these languages be saved for generations to come.
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llywela13 · 11 months
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Hey hi! Love your blog.
I do not live in Wales, but I speak some Welsh. I've recently gotten into fantasy tv, and a lot of the fantasy languages seem to be based on Welsh.
For instance, Merlin was performing an incantation, but he was essentially just saying 'brechdan' over and over, which I believe means sandwich. Similarly, the Lord of the Rings features whole phrases in Welsh, but people call it 'Elvish.'
I feel a tad uncomfortable when this happens. Welsh is a beautiful language and it feels appropriated here.
Do you think there needs to be a conversation surrounding this? Again, I am not Welsh, but I am curious to know your opinion.
Thanks from Scotland <3
Hiya!
Yes, a lot of fantasy languages and sci fi character names do often tend to be based on Welsh. Enfys Nest in Star Wars: A Solo Story, anyone? Star Trek had Kira's given name as Nerys, and didn't even pronounce it correctly.
Lord of the Rings is slightly different, because Tolkien did invent an entire new language, several of them, and was very open about the fact that one of them (Sindarin) was modelled on the Welsh language and looks and behaves a lot like Welsh but is a different language. Since then, no doubt because of him, a lot of other fantasy writers have followed in his footsteps in using Welsh as a 'fantasy' language but have taken the lazier road of using actual Welsh words fairly indiscriminantly instead of making up their own language. Merlin is a good and sadly egregious example (everyone in that show should be Welsh; Brythonic should be their living language, not any kind of 'magical Old Tongue'; Arthur was not English). The Witcher is another, that show has quite famously used random Welsh words in quite nonsensical ways. I started reading fantasy when I was quite young, and I remember being taken aback when I started to realise how many fantasy settings were very thinly modelled on the British Isles, with 'Wales' always represented as the 'magical' western land where elves and fairies reside. Nancy Springer, Katherine Kerr - they've all done it. More recently, I've noticed a trend of usually American fantasy writers using Wales itself and its mythology as a setting, re-telling our myths and legends as fantasy fiction, many of them without ever having set foot in Wales.
And yes, I do find it uncomfortable. Wales isn't a 'fantasy' country, free for the picking, our language isn't magical or fantastical, it is a real, living language which real, living people speak in their very real country, which has been marginalised for centuries. Being represented in sci fi and fantasy as 'magical' and 'other' is not helpful, and neither is having our very real myths and legends re-told as fantasy fiction by strangers in foreign lands. It all adds up.
So yeah, there probably should be a conversation about it.
Thanks for your interest!
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daianotherday · 11 months
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This can fuck all the way off.
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I would sooner shit in my hands and clap than swear allegiance to the billionaire on his magic fucking chair with his shiny fucking king hat.
The absolute lunacy of all this is astounding. Every carrot fawning over this bollocks needs therapy.
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howlsofannwn · 6 months
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Welsh Folklore
Black cats, often considered banes and the companions of dark entities elsewhere, are welcomed in Wales as felicitous granters of bright fortune and good health.
"Cath ddu, mi glywais dd'wedyd,/ A fedr swyno hefyd,/ A chadw'r teulu lle mae'n byw/O afael pob rhyw glefyd."
"A black cat, I've heard it said,/ Can charm all ill away,/ And keep the house wherein she dwells/ From fever's deadly sway."
- Welsh folk-lore: a collection of the folk-tales and legends of North Wales by Elias Owen, 1896
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creatrixcymraes · 6 months
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some cute lil celestial signs ✨🌙
yn Gymraeg hefyd wrth gwrs 🥰
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