choco_frosh: (Default)
[personal profile] choco_frosh
I swear, Duolingo is picking sentences and new vocabulary to try to shame me into getting up and taking a shower.

Date: 2019-08-10 11:25 am (UTC)
lauradi7dw: (Default)
From: [personal profile] lauradi7dw
I studied Russian in the 1970s. When I used Mango a couple of years ago to prepare for a trip, it was clear that they wanted me to eat meet, drink vodka, and buy fur. (and find the bus stop, and other things that were actually relevant to my life).

Welsh

Date: 2019-08-13 01:26 pm (UTC)
lauradi7dw: (Default)
From: [personal profile] lauradi7dw
When Prince Charles was installed as Prince of Wales, there was a great deal of press, even in the local papers in North Carolina. One thing that was noted with approval was that he spent a year studying Welsh, and then used it to speak with the locals. I wouldn't have remembered the timing exactly, although I know I was pubescent at the time, but it was 50 years ago this summer. Not long afterward, the singer Tom Jones (originally from Wales) hosted a US variety TV show with lots of popular singers. At the end of each episode, he recited something in Welsh, supposedly a blessing (could have been a curse or a grocery list, for all most of us knew). The combination of the two things made me resolve to learn Welsh as an adult. I never did. When we visited Wales as tourists maybe twenty years ago, I bought a booklet called "Teach Yourself Welsh." I got as far as learning to sound out the words on the road sounds, but no grammar or vocabulary. I did have the lightbulb go off over my head in one regard, though - I realized that Shakespeare named the character in "Henry V" Fluellen as a transcription of the Welsh pronunciation of Llewellyn, or at least some popular impression of what the ll sounded like.

At least some Welsh-language actors move to the US. Matthew Rhys and Ioan Gruffudd both spoke Welsh as a first language, learned English in school, and have lived and worked here for many years.

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