A Welsh Language Forum

I agree with you, Baruch and admit to @Toffidil that my Cymraeg is not good enough, or my patience!

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Fixed that for you. :slight_smile:

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I don’t like pedants anyway, because they almost invariably don’t know as much as they think they do, and as a consequence their quibbles are generally fallacious…

And I don’t like them in Welsh learners’ forums (the pedants would insist on ‘fora’, by the way - more idiocy!) for precise the reason you @henddraig mention - that they in effect stifle and gag ordinary learners and make them feel small (which is always the pedant’s primary motive everywhere, of course).

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I have been chided for the level of my Welsh and for some colloquialisms ive used. Its very embarassing.

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Don’t let yourself be embarrassed, Anthony. And as for use of colloquialisms, this is to be applauded - you’re emulating the native speakers! Most of your pedant/purist critics, of course, will NOT be native speakers - they’re the zealots of the language arena, and should no more be listened to than any other type of zealot. :wink:

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I suspect there’s a balance to be struck, but that purists fail to see they’re actually contributing to an atmosphere that can make mamiaith speakers feel their Welsh isn’t ‘good enough’. (I say a balance because I have actually heard some Occitan speakers sound so French I kind of lost track of what language they were speaking - not quite the same with Welsh & English where grammar & syntax are so different.) Still, you’re allowed to say ‘fora’ but I reckon anyone who insists on it should always be asked how many musea they’ve visited lately…

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I’m not normally too pedantic about English with one exception (which I’ve probably bored the forum with before) and this is the regular misuse of the simple past and past participle of irregular and strong verbs. e.g. “I have ran” instead of “I have run”. or using “rang” where it should be “rung” and vice-versa. They scream out so badly to me as being just “wrong” that I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t feel the same, but apparently, they don’t.

In the long run, we are all dead, as John Maynard Keynes used to say down the pub, and in the long run all verbs will become regularised, but while they still aren’t, I think we should enjoy their rich variety (correctly), while we may.

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Yeah, but I’m afraid that (a) that’s a matter of class/regional dialect - try asking people in Liverpool to complete the sentence “I have (telephoned) him twice today” using the verb “ring” versus, say, Oxfordshire folks; and (b) the Standard is actually variable even among educated speakers (Housman uses ‘sprung’ instead of the dictionary’s ‘sprang’ in his verse “Here dead lie we, &c.”) That variation is the very stuff of the rich variety :slight_smile:

I fear there’s no ‘fail to see’ about it with the purists - on the contrary, in my experience they (generally, anyway) revel in contributing to that atmosphere. :confused:

Well, there’s no point my spluttering and expostulating over how counter-productive that is, as I suspect you’re way ahead of me. But there is a thing I came across somewhere – unfortunately I have no idea where, now – about learning skills of any sort, and which I think is relevant: “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” It’s true that the original intent of that quote is about practice and improvement, which could be part of a learner’s trajectory towards the ideal of ‘perfect’ Welsh, but I think it also applies to the sort of language ecosystem implied by an organic transmission that includes the hearth, the workplace, and the school playground. You’ll only get perfection once a language is dead.

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Quite so, Richard. And in acquiring a language, as in anything else, we learn by our mistakes. :slight_smile:

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I suppose the problem learners (like me) have is knowing when something is equivalent to, “He was sat sitting on the bus!” (Frequently heard somewhere I lived, but I’ve forgotten where). dialect, accepetable locally, or if it’s just plain wrong anywhere, or so quaintly archaic that it’s like the teacher of (ancient) Greek at my school who, when their coach driver looked like setting off before her husband panted up, cried, in Greek, “Charioteer, hold in check thy horses!”

Its only partly class / region. In fact I’m very comfortable with and enthusiastically support regional variation. It’s the people who otherwise speak standard / rp English who get it wrong which grates a bit.

I remember the Guardian once writing that a ship “hoved into view”

True there are variations in standard language as well, and I think part of that is the old irregulars becoming regularised. I believe this phenomenon is happening in German too.

Oh dear,I know it wasn’t me because I have never written for The Guardian, but I might well put that! Read a lot of Hornblower, see!

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Aha! My mantra! It’s a shame it has taken me quite so long to adopt it.

@mikeellwood - my mother rolls her eyes at my constant abuse of yr iaith fain. Good job she doesn’t understand Welsh or I’d be for it! :scream:

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I’ve made the point before: a repetition may be in place. From my experience in moving to another country when I was younger, one good way to identify a bore, or an ignoramus, is to see how they make fun of your ability to speak another language. Their problem, not yours.

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I just had a nice chat with my new neighbour; she and her family moved here from Greece. They have two sons, 14 years old twins, and one of them joined our chat in the laundry room for a while. He and his brother are attending a German school for 3 months now and I was absolutely amazed at how good and fluent he’s already speaking German! I did hardly trust my ears! He told me that the whole family made it a habit to watch German movies and series on Netflix. The whole family is so kind, open and charming!

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Correct, @Baruch! :slight_smile:

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It’s difficult. I am of the internet pioneer generation, I was 18 when it was just good old Telnet and command prompt based! My conceptualisation of the web and what is for seems to be very different to millennials, for whom the web was always there. The traditional forum format is fairly dead.
What struck me recently was the decline of the search engine, even Google aren’t bothering too much with it anymore; how on Earth are people finding information without using search engines. It seems these days people don’t want to look for content, or scroll down a list. It seems they want it beamed at them.
So in the context of creating a space for the Welsh language on the web, they would have be be some algorithms trawling the web for Cymraeg content and putting popular content on the front page.
Yet what we really want is discussions.But what killed off discussions was trolling (ever since the birth of the internet there have been trolls, why won’t they die!, though at least the old foebeast ‘the LAG’ seems to have been tamed).
It would be nice to think that Cymraeg was a blissful troll free zone, but we have our own trolls in language police .

Maybe the solution is for something to embrace bilingualism? Nothing else really does this. You have bits of the web in other languages, but they cater for language group where not everybody speaks English, which is what we have in Wales. Something that would pull Welsh content in both languages, then create a safe space (i.e no language police, encourage mistakes) within that for Welsh learners.

This might be harder to do and require more coding, but a lot of these algorithms already exist and would simply be a question of bolting them on. Then blitz the Welsh language media and Wales based media, and hope it takes off.

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I think that’s a bit simplistic. Discussions happen on both Facebook and Twitter, but the issues I always find come down to a lack of will to listen as well as speak. Too many people think they can have an opinion, express it, and then be immune from other people pointing out that that opinion is misconceived or illogical or based on a false premise. Conversely, of course, a huge amount of discussion quickly degrades into ad hom attacks, which are so much easier than constructing a proper counter-argument. We seem to find ourselves in an inwardly moving spiral where our lack of willingness to discuss things with people who disagree with us leads us into entrenching in ghettoes of like-minded individuals, and the tendency is for those ghettoes to then go to (idiological) war with each other.

To get back to your main point, what you seem to be talking about is some kind of AI-based aggregator that would pull (news?) items of interest together and present them as a kind of blog with opportunities to discuss the points raised by the items. I wonder if a model for this already exists - It would be good if something off the shelf could be cheaply set up so that the main (crowd-sourced?) budget could be blown on publicity.

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