There are some people in Wales who are quite militant and obsessive about keeping the language alive and attempt to force it on those parts of Wales where the language was never widely spoken. For example I live in a part of Wales where pretty much everyone speaks English as their first language and always have done. You rarely hear anyone speaking Welsh around here unless it's people who've come on the bus up from Bala and places like that.
I object to everything having to be bilingual. Whenever you get any kind of official documentation in the post, whether it be from the NHS, the local authority, the DVLA, the police etc you have to receive it in both English AND Welsh, so you'll get two lots of letters, leaflets etc. It's ridiculous and a waste of money and resources IMO, money that could be better spend on improving public services, which already lag behind those in England.
But you can't say anything about it because the Welsh language lobby, and they are in the minority BTW, are very vocal and carry a lot of clout in Wales.
My wife is Welsh speaking, I'm not.
Some of my neighbours and friends are, most aren't.
I don't object to those who are being addressed in their native tongue in their homeland.
I think it would be rude to consider otherwise.
There are some people in Wales who are quite militant and obsessive about keeping the language alive and attempt to force it on those parts of Wales where the language was never widely spoken. For example I live in a part of Wales where pretty much everyone speaks English as their first language and always have done. You rarely hear anyone speaking Welsh around here unless it's people who've come on the bus up from Bala and places like that.
I object to everything having to be bilingual. Whenever you get any kind of official documentation in the post, whether it be from the NHS, the local authority, the DVLA, the police etc you have to receive it in both English AND Welsh, so you'll get two lots of letters, leaflets etc. It's ridiculous and a waste of money and resources IMO, money that could be better spend on improving public services, which already lag behind those in England.
But you can't say anything about it because the Welsh language lobby, and they are in the minority BTW, are very vocal and carry a lot of clout in Wales.
Lol. Try going to Canada. Even in British Columbia, 2,500km from French-speaking Quebec, everything - all signs, all products for sale, all services, all government literature, must be bi-lingual.
There are some people in Wales who are quite militant and obsessive about keeping the language alive and attempt to force it on those parts of Wales where the language was never widely spoken. For example I live in a part of Wales where pretty much everyone speaks English as their first language and always have done. You rarely hear anyone speaking Welsh around here unless it's people who've come on the bus up from Bala and places like that.
Hmm. There are very very few places in Wales where Welsh was never spoken widely. Even the most anglicised of places today (e.g Radnorshire and the Vale of Glamorgan) were heavily Welsh speaking as late as the 19th century.
Basically if the names of the villages towns and farms around where you live are predominantly Welsh then you can be pretty sure that Welsh was the original language of the inhabitants.
I object to everything having to be bilingual. Whenever you get any kind of official documentation in the post, whether it be from the NHS, the local authority, the DVLA, the police etc you have to receive it in both English AND Welsh, so you'll get two lots of letters, leaflets etc. It's ridiculous and a waste of money and resources IMO, money that could be better spend on improving public services, which already lag behind those in England.
The reality of having two languages of equal status (as conferred by the Welsh Language Act) is that official things will be bilingual.
However I agree that there should be a central database whereby people indicate their language preference. NHS, councils, DVLA could have access and send only one document. Fairly easy to set up I'd have thought.
There must be the option of correspondence in Welsh though, otherwise, by implication, the organisation would be diminishing the status of one of the languages, and as I said they are meant to be equal.
I would say in the standard German Hochdeutsch 'ich wunsche dir einen schonen Tag' would be more likely than 'ich wunsche dir einen guten Tag'.
'Have a nice day' in German German is 'schonen Tag noch'
Swiss Germans tend to use 'merci' rather than 'danke', 'velo' for 'Rad' and 'sackli' for 'Tute', so a few influences from Swiss French there
Never hear 'schön' used to indicate 'good day' myself but fair enough if it is.
I noticed last time I was in Bonn how people are adopting some quite surprising loanwords, even for very basic things.
'Sorry' instead of 'es tut mir leid'
and
'happy' instead of the many German words they have e.g. 'glücklich.'
We headed down south for a short holiday this year to just outside of Tenby - beautiful countryside still but they spoke funny. I said 'Diolch yn fawr' as I would normally after being served and they looked at me like I spoke a different language
Yup, us Gogs think the Taffs down South aren't proper Welsh. We still watch pobol y Cwm but have to have English subtitles on as their Welsh isn't the same as ours! The places I have visited in South Wales have been nice but very....um, English whereas with a few notable exceptions, North wales is proper Welsh (Barmouth = Birmingham by the Sea in school holidays; Rhyl = Scouse-on- the-water)
We headed down south for a short holiday this year to just outside of Tenby - beautiful countryside still but they spoke funny. I said 'Diolch yn fawr' as I would normally after being served and they looked at me like I spoke a different language
Yup, us Gogs think the Taffs down South aren't proper Welsh. We still watch pobol y Cwm but have to have English subtitles on as their Welsh isn't the same as ours! The places I have visited in South Wales have been nice but very....um, English whereas with a few notable exceptions, North wales is proper Welsh (Barmouth = Birmingham by the Sea in school holidays; Rhyl = Scouse-on- the-water)
People from Rhyl, Prestatyn and that way tend to have a Scouse twang, probably due to the influx of people from Liverpool and Merseyside who've moved and settled there over the years. Llandudno is another place where you'll find a lot of English tourists and settlers.
The Valleys consist of towns built around mining and a few associated industries, that had the rug pulled out from under them 30 years ago. What exactly were you expecting? To be fair, despite their decline, they are making a good go of finding ways to maintain a local economy. Some great breweries around there, and Pwll Mawr is good fun (along with the other touristy things at Blaenafon).
I know but i just never realised it was that bad! I found everything so 'grey' and morbid....shop fronts which looked like a 1950's film set, old terraced houses lit by a solitary 40w bulb hanging from a ceiling centre rose fitting. Everything just looked so poor and depressing, yet only a few miles away in Swansea you find huge gated mansions!
There are some people in Wales who are quite militant and obsessive about keeping the language alive and attempt to force it on those parts of Wales where the language was never widely spoken. For example I live in a part of Wales where pretty much everyone speaks English as their first language and always have done. You rarely hear anyone speaking Welsh around here unless it's people who've come on the bus up from Bala and places like that.
I object to everything having to be bilingual. Whenever you get any kind of official documentation in the post, whether it be from the NHS, the local authority, the DVLA, the police etc you have to receive it in both English AND Welsh, so you'll get two lots of letters, leaflets etc. It's ridiculous and a waste of money and resources IMO, money that could be better spend on improving public services, which already lag behind those in England.
But you can't say anything about it because the Welsh language lobby, and they are in the minority BTW, are very vocal and carry a lot of clout in Wales.
Give 'em independence.....they'd soon change their tune!
Why would they? There'd be even more reason then to promote the Welsh language.
How long do you think it would last as an independent country? A few sheep farms and sea front Cafes won't sustain the population. :D
Take Cornwall as an example who have their own language. They aren't quite so daft to even mention the word 'independence'.......and they've got Clotted Cream and Pasties! :cool:
yeah and the bestial/sheep sex industry LOLZ ROFL D LMAO hehehehe:D
/yawn
Hhmmmm......now there may well be a few quid to be made from that. Look around and you might even find a few willing Dragons to give the ultimate Nationalist theme. :D
We headed down south for a short holiday this year to just outside of Tenby - beautiful countryside still but they spoke funny. I said 'Diolch yn fawr' as I would normally after being served and they looked at me like I spoke a different language
Yup, us Gogs think the Taffs down South aren't proper Welsh. We still watch pobol y Cwm but have to have English subtitles on as their Welsh isn't the same as ours! The places I have visited in South Wales have been nice but very....um, English whereas with a few notable exceptions, North wales is proper Welsh (Barmouth = Birmingham by the Sea in school holidays; Rhyl = Scouse-on- the-water)
I assume that part is tongue-in-cheek?!
Also, your comments about Barmouth and Rhyl come across as a bit "bloody tourists", but those Brummies and Scousers bring in a heck of a lot of money and want to visit Wales, which should be encouraged in my opinion.
Sorry if you were just having a laugh, but opinions along those lines always wind me up.
A girl in my university course spoke fluent Welsh, I had just viewed Wales as at extension of England before I found out that they had their own language.
We headed down south for a short holiday this year to just outside of Tenby - beautiful countryside still but they spoke funny. I said 'Diolch yn fawr' as I would normally after being served and they looked at me like I spoke a different language
Yup, us Gogs think the Taffs down South aren't proper Welsh. We still watch pobol y Cwm but have to have English subtitles on as their Welsh isn't the same as ours! The places I have visited in South Wales have been nice but very....um, English whereas with a few notable exceptions, North wales is proper Welsh (Barmouth = Birmingham by the Sea in school holidays; Rhyl = Scouse-on- the-water)
On the contrary the county with the largest numbers of Welsh speakers is Carmarthenshire especially in the heartland of the Gwendraeth and Aman valleys... which is where Pobol y Cwm is set of course :cool:
Not surprising you heard little Welsh in Tenby; southern Pembrokeshire has been anglicised since the 12th and 13th centuries and is colloquially known as 'Little England beyond Wales'.
Oh yes and obviously without the English visiting us for 6 weeks of the year our whole economy would fall apart :cool:
You've just shut down the entire Mobile Home 'industry'!
How many English maintain vans on those sites the year round? The vast majority are owned by English, particularly from the Midlands.
A girl in my university course spoke fluent Welsh, I had just viewed Wales as at extension of England before I found out that they had their own language.
You'd never noticed the flag or the national sports teams before?
You've just shut down the entire Mobile Home 'industry'!
How many English maintain vans on those sites the year round? The vast majority are owned by English, particularly from the Midlands.
Not sure where your idea of most being from the Midlands comes from, certainly up to Porthmadoc area it is a large amount of Midlanders but north from there it is predominantly people from the North west. Most sites are open from March to October with many unoccupied Monday to Friday. I live along the coast and am friends with many site owners, they often comment on how people turn up to their caravans on Friday evening with a boot full of shopping brought from home so they dont have to buy anything from our local shops, they will drive on petrol fumes to get to a cheaper petrol station despite it only costing about 50p extra for a full tank. Most complain at having to pay 5p for a carrier bag when they do venture into the shop. Plus there is a lot more to Wales than a coastline so although there are a fair few caravan sites around they certainly are not responsible for maintaining our economy.
But hey, dont let facts get in the way of a good discussion ;-)
Oh yes and obviously without the English visiting us for 6 weeks of the year our whole economy would fall apart :cool:
If that was a dig at me, that wasn't actually what I was saying. I was just pointing out that a large influx of tourists is very good for the local economy. I bet you wouldn't catch many residents of Barmouth complaining about it, considering many of them would be employed in a tourist related industry. :cool:
If that was a dig at me, that wasn't actually what I was saying. I was just pointing out that a large influx of tourists is very good for the local area. I bet you wouldn't catch many residents of Barmouth complaining about it, considering many of them would be employed in a tourist related industry. :cool:
Uhm, I live just outside of Barmouth, you really dont want to know what they make of tourists
Our largest local employer is actually Gwynedd Council. It may surprise some of you but we also have schools and colleges that need teachers, assistants, cleaners, dinner ladies etc. You would be shocked to find just how many people rely on tourism in this area, for most its a bit of extra money to supplement other income
Uhm, I live just outside of Barmouth, you really dont want to know what they make of tourists
Our largest local employer is actually Gwynedd Council. It may surprise some of you but we also have schools and colleges that need teachers, assistants, cleaners, dinner ladies etc. You would be shocked to find just how many people rely on tourism in this area, for most its a bit of extra money to supplement other income
Probably only a handful think that, though. After all, unless they've never left their local area in their lives, they've been tourists themselves, too. I've been to the Mid Wales coast many times (I'm from the Midlands, so of course I have ) and I've only ever felt very welcomed by the locals and have received excellent service. So if they dislike me, they're damn good actors haha.
I wasn't meaning to suggest that leisure and tourism was the number 1 employer in the area, just that many people do benefit from it; especially in the summer months.
If that was a dig at me, that wasn't actually what I was saying. I was just pointing out that a large influx of tourists is very good for the local economy. I bet you wouldn't catch many residents of Barmouth complaining about it, considering many of them would be employed in a tourist related industry. :cool:
Most people employed in the tourism business, seem to be English anyway.
Comments
Some of my neighbours and friends are, most aren't.
I don't object to those who are being addressed in their native tongue in their homeland.
I think it would be rude to consider otherwise.
Lol. Try going to Canada. Even in British Columbia, 2,500km from French-speaking Quebec, everything - all signs, all products for sale, all services, all government literature, must be bi-lingual.
Hmm. There are very very few places in Wales where Welsh was never spoken widely. Even the most anglicised of places today (e.g Radnorshire and the Vale of Glamorgan) were heavily Welsh speaking as late as the 19th century.
Basically if the names of the villages towns and farms around where you live are predominantly Welsh then you can be pretty sure that Welsh was the original language of the inhabitants.
The reality of having two languages of equal status (as conferred by the Welsh Language Act) is that official things will be bilingual.
However I agree that there should be a central database whereby people indicate their language preference. NHS, councils, DVLA could have access and send only one document. Fairly easy to set up I'd have thought.
There must be the option of correspondence in Welsh though, otherwise, by implication, the organisation would be diminishing the status of one of the languages, and as I said they are meant to be equal.
I would say in the standard German Hochdeutsch 'ich wunsche dir einen schonen Tag' would be more likely than 'ich wunsche dir einen guten Tag'.
'Have a nice day' in German German is 'schonen Tag noch'
Swiss Germans tend to use 'merci' rather than 'danke', 'velo' for 'Rad' and 'sackli' for 'Tute', so a few influences from Swiss French there
Never hear 'schön' used to indicate 'good day' myself but fair enough if it is.
I noticed last time I was in Bonn how people are adopting some quite surprising loanwords, even for very basic things.
'Sorry' instead of 'es tut mir leid'
and
'happy' instead of the many German words they have e.g. 'glücklich.'
Yup, us Gogs think the Taffs down South aren't proper Welsh. We still watch pobol y Cwm but have to have English subtitles on as their Welsh isn't the same as ours! The places I have visited in South Wales have been nice but very....um, English whereas with a few notable exceptions, North wales is proper Welsh (Barmouth = Birmingham by the Sea in school holidays; Rhyl = Scouse-on- the-water)
People from Rhyl, Prestatyn and that way tend to have a Scouse twang, probably due to the influx of people from Liverpool and Merseyside who've moved and settled there over the years. Llandudno is another place where you'll find a lot of English tourists and settlers.
Chalk and Cheese!
Give 'em independence.....they'd soon change their tune!
Take Cornwall as an example who have their own language. They aren't quite so daft to even mention the word 'independence'.......and they've got Clotted Cream and Pasties!
Spoken by a handful of people.
yeah and the bestial/sheep sex industry LOLZ
/yawn
Oooh.....i forgot to mention the tin mine 'industry'! :cool:
Hhmmmm......now there may well be a few quid to be made from that. Look around and you might even find a few willing Dragons to give the ultimate Nationalist theme.
I assume that part is tongue-in-cheek?!
Also, your comments about Barmouth and Rhyl come across as a bit "bloody tourists", but those Brummies and Scousers bring in a heck of a lot of money and want to visit Wales, which should be encouraged in my opinion.
Sorry if you were just having a laugh, but opinions along those lines always wind me up.
Oh yes and obviously without the English visiting us for 6 weeks of the year our whole economy would fall apart :cool:
On the contrary the county with the largest numbers of Welsh speakers is Carmarthenshire especially in the heartland of the Gwendraeth and Aman valleys... which is where Pobol y Cwm is set of course :cool:
Not surprising you heard little Welsh in Tenby; southern Pembrokeshire has been anglicised since the 12th and 13th centuries and is colloquially known as 'Little England beyond Wales'.
How many English maintain vans on those sites the year round? The vast majority are owned by English, particularly from the Midlands.
You'd never noticed the flag or the national sports teams before?
Not sure where your idea of most being from the Midlands comes from, certainly up to Porthmadoc area it is a large amount of Midlanders but north from there it is predominantly people from the North west. Most sites are open from March to October with many unoccupied Monday to Friday. I live along the coast and am friends with many site owners, they often comment on how people turn up to their caravans on Friday evening with a boot full of shopping brought from home so they dont have to buy anything from our local shops, they will drive on petrol fumes to get to a cheaper petrol station despite it only costing about 50p extra for a full tank. Most complain at having to pay 5p for a carrier bag when they do venture into the shop. Plus there is a lot more to Wales than a coastline so although there are a fair few caravan sites around they certainly are not responsible for maintaining our economy.
But hey, dont let facts get in the way of a good discussion ;-)
If that was a dig at me, that wasn't actually what I was saying. I was just pointing out that a large influx of tourists is very good for the local economy. I bet you wouldn't catch many residents of Barmouth complaining about it, considering many of them would be employed in a tourist related industry. :cool:
Uhm, I live just outside of Barmouth, you really dont want to know what they make of tourists
Our largest local employer is actually Gwynedd Council. It may surprise some of you but we also have schools and colleges that need teachers, assistants, cleaners, dinner ladies etc. You would be shocked to find just how many people rely on tourism in this area, for most its a bit of extra money to supplement other income
Probably only a handful think that, though. After all, unless they've never left their local area in their lives, they've been tourists themselves, too. I've been to the Mid Wales coast many times (I'm from the Midlands, so of course I have
I wasn't meaning to suggest that leisure and tourism was the number 1 employer in the area, just that many people do benefit from it; especially in the summer months.
Most people employed in the tourism business, seem to be English anyway.