Wouldn’t it be lovely if we all thought of folks we don’t know, whoever they are, wherever they come from, whatever language they speak as a freed/friend we don’t know. But then perhaps I’m just naive.
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You’re not the only one.
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You know that host and hostilities are from the same root. Also French tueur, and tutor. Well the person receiving you may be hostile, and the persons being tutored have to die to their old lives
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…and ‘Waals’ in Dutch refers to the French speaking part of Belgium…
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This wikipedia page is quite interesting:
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I find it even more galling that the Foreign Language section of Waterstones in my Sussex town doesn’t have any Welsh books at all. It’s not so much “foreign” as “completely ignored”. Most people’s reaction when I say I’m learning Welsh is “What on earth are you learning that for?”
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Wales is clearly a small country, faraway from Sussex, of which people in Sussex know little. How sad for the people of Sussex, England, Britain and the myth of a “United Kingdom”… I like a bit of union, myself, (trades, European, et al) but I really cannot understand what “Conservative & Unionist” voters/parties, think they subscribe to…
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It’s not Wales that’s completely ignored by Sussex people. Most of them have visited Wales at least as much as they’ve visited any other part of the United Kingdom. It’s just that for them Wales is a country that speaks English (as indeed it is for many Welsh people too). So the Welsh language is just that irritating bit on Welsh road signs which gets in the way of reading the English!
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Even sadder… 
I see ARAF written on road in large letters and I think “Nice! I’m in Wales again”
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What’s more they’re encouraging you to look at the scenery 
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I like that , when I am playing geoguessr (game using selected Google maps to show a random place and you have to explore and guess where it is - for those who don’t know it already), when I see “ARAF”, I know I am somewhere in Cymru
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That, on Earth, I’d know to speak and understand it, that’s why! … And besides … it’s the language of Gods!
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Apologies for not posting for several days, but I don’t have Internet access at home.
It’s ironic that English, a language containing influences big and small from many other languages, should have spawned a subset of people so resolute in their belief that everybody else should speak English.
When President George W Bush said that it was a shame that the French didn’t have a word for “entrepreneur”, I nearly choked on my sandwich, so at least it’s not wholly confined to England. By definition, of course, anybody reading this is interested in languages and cultures and history. But many - but by no means all - British ex-pats living in Spain for example, have created English-speaking enclaves which, I suspect, doesn’t play well with the native born population.
I often wonder why we English are so poor at learning other languages. Maybe it’s partly the fault of the education system. Maybe it’s partly a lack of political will.
Maybe it’s partly the fact that English people with languages aren’t remunerated accordingly (I’ve seen many job adverts for foreign language speaking call centre staff where the language element doesn’t attract a premium). But I reckon that English’s spread, and the fact that it’s spoken in the US, is a major factor.
I remember a German businessman’s quote that, when he’s doing business in Britain, he’s happy to speak English. But when a UK company is touting for business in Germany, he prefers to speak German. Which is fair enough.
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When asked why he’d climbed Mount Everest, Edmund Hillary replied: “Because it’s there”.
A foreign holiday is a fine reason to learn another language. As, indeed, is a need to conduct business overseas, or a foreign partner or spouse .
But knowledge for it’s own sake is ALWAYS worthwhile. Whether it’s learning Welsh or anything else, knowledge is GOOD for you as an end in itself. An active, inquisitive, questioning mind is a healthy mind, and - as grown ups - we need to be informed in order to make sound decisions in our lives.
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If they tell you this in Sussex, imagine how they react in Italy that’s not even close to Wales. 
After that, I got this range of extra reactions:
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why don’t you study something useful, instead, like [insert widely spoken language of choice]
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why don’t you study [insert italian dialect with more or less vague northern European origin of choice]
Maybe it was the same for @tatjana -
is there a Welsh language?
(Often followed by…Is it a dialect? Was it spoken in ancient times, like Latin? Isn’t it impossibly complicated? And such)
But then they just accept it, with a mix of amusement and admiration for the effort. Quite a few people on the beach, while on holiday last week, were asking about my progress!
@david-ball-1
Most people are just too lazy to learn other languages unless they’re forced to!
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No particular questions at all. Reaction to the fact I’m learning Welsh is quite tepid. Most people say “Oh, Welsh, great.” quite absend-minded and afterwards maybe “How come you learn it?” or “Why did you start to learn?” and only maybe then follows the question how do I learn it if there’s no classes in our country, but that’s approximately all. The sentence “You could learn it too if you’d like to.” is already overheard though … I’m sad about this but (to be honest) I don’t have the energy left to argue and persuade them to anything at all. No one asks me about my progress anywhere (in my country) because no one actually cares. I many times feel forbidden to talk about what and how I’m learning and about my progress in doing so, which is clearly shown to me with dull sighs and quiet comments they think I don’t hear.
There are some people from Wales living in Slovenia (I’ve got that info form here and there) but no one actually speaks Welsh. All the other people (not living in Slovenia though) who I’ve encountered on the net and tried to engage them with me for a little (could be written) chat, just weren’t interested in the thing so I’m alone and lonely again and I’m loosing the momentum rapidly. (sorry for that though but that’s how it is when you don’t have the time to engage into many online chats or you don’t have anyone to talk face to face with). You become too lazy in time to do anything at all and here we are.
However I’m still angry when (if at all) someone says any language is useless and pointless to learn, counting Welsh in here aswell. They ALWAYS get some quick lesson back from me …
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It goes without saying that no Welsh person, whether they understand any Welsh or not, would consider Welsh to be a foreign language, Peter.
The issue here is that, while Wales remains part of the United Kingdom, it is totally inappropriate for someone in another UK member-country to refer to Welsh as a foreign language, which libraries and bookshops sometimes do. If Wales gains its independence and becomes a sovereign state, at that point Welsh would be a foreign language (but perhaps not in Oswestry!!)
“someone” or an organisation? I think the “inappropriateness” of what individuals think and what organisations do should be judged differently. Foreign is anything unfamiliar to the individual, according to the Oxford English Dictionary at least. Maths can be foreign to somebody.
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Knowledge for its own sake is valuable. An enquiring mind is a healthy mind. I knew a guy whose brother taught himself Italian for no other reason than he had some free time and he thought he’d give it a go.
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Prety much the same with me learning Italian a while ago. Learning German was a need though as my mother’s friend’s husband spoke nothing but German, English is so wide-spread that it became (more or less) universal language in all spheres and other languages I’ve learnt were also prety much as Italian was - out of curiousity, and then further a pure wish to speak them at least a little.
With Welsh was a but different. I was challenged from two teenagers to learn it and after that the challenges kept being thrown at me from various direction in various periodes of time. Hearing that the language was at the edge of extinction and that even nowdays there are many people, if even Welsh, who don’t want to learn and speak it, has put something in my heart to throw myself into sirious (well, let’s say so), learning and trying to speak it.
Being able to speak in various languages is fun and I NEVER ask myself if learning them is of any use or not. Every language comes handy at least once in a lifetime and that once worth endlessly if you can use it.
But, yes, the things I’ve written above in the comment you’re replying to are also true. I don’t doubt the usefulness of my learning but rather am sad about the peoples look at such thing and how discouraging they can be from time to time.
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