Learning Welsh and open-mindedness

As a Welsh person who couldn’t/can’t speak Welsh, I think that element is often over-emphasised! I was brought up with a very positive attitude towards the Welsh language even though my family couldn’t speak it. And I think a lot of people in South-East Wales are learning Welsh now that the opportunities are there.

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Definitely computer programming, I think. I live with a lover of mathematics who is now doing some very stern and disapproving pointing as he explains that the word ‘egalitarian’ does not have a numeric quantity and the exclamation mark therefore makes no mathematical sense and must mean ‘not equal to’ as in programming language, but definitely not maths. …Or something like that. I sort of switched off when he got to the word ‘factorial’.

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Squiggly top line in writing, as Mike said, but I’ve never seen it in text - I can’t imagine that ‘approximately equal to’ would be very useful in many codebases…

Cut’n’paste…:wink:

Yes, I think that’s very much the norm now… :slight_smile: :heart:

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To @mikeellwood as well as @aran, ~ is available on the third choice screen keyboard of my ipad, but not what you use != for! I could sympathise with @Isata’s husband! I think ~ is valid for approximately! I HATED Fortran, Mike! Formatting was a pain. I first met it when I was in Harrogate and the computer was in Bristol. I had to write out programs and someone else put them, I think, into punched cards! She couldn’t read my writing. When I next met a computer and could directly feed machine code in, that was bliss! I guess I never used ~ in a program, but I didn’t deal with fuzzy logic! (that was mostly after my time)!

≈ or ≅ and ≃ all have unicode :slight_smile: The wavy equals sign is the one I learned - it intuitively makes sense to me

The usual question I get from non-Welsh speakers in England (including most recently this weekend) is “How often do you get to speak it?” To which the answer these days is pretty much “most days”.

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And in the same Wikipedia article!

The “=” symbol that is now universally accepted in mathematics for equality was first recorded by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde in The Whetstone of Witte (1557).

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I’ve a poster about Robert Recorde on my classroom wall - picked up in the science tent of some eisteddfod I think.!

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Diolch yn fawr iawn iawn @leiafee I was quite convinced that I was told, at school in England, that = like 0 was from the Babylonians. Certainly nobody mentioned Robert!

The idea that being positive about people learning Welsh generally comes from open-minded people may be partially true. Open minded people tend to look for the positives reasons first, closed minded may tend to look for problems first.

They do, I grew up with this and I kind of get it. Much of Wales lacks opportunities for young people, young people who haven’t realised quite what a wonderful amazing place they already live in, they just want new things, new opportunities and excitement. I’m old enough to know that you find these things within yourself and with the people around you, not in some far flung perceived paradise. So, yes it is possible to live in Wales and view Wales negatively.
For example I grew up in Mid Wales in an area that lost it’s Welsh speaking tradition many generations ago. Yet every year the Royal Welsh Show comes to town and suddenly there are huge crowds of Welsh speaking farmers taking over the pubs. Now as a young person, what you see is lots of old people, doing something [farming and speaking Welsh] you just want to get away from. So when you hear Welsh spoken, you tend to view it in a negative light…well unless you are lucky enough to hear it from a stupidly hot farm girl ( /boy if you are that way inclined). When I was growing up in Mid Wales, Welsh wasn’t seen as cool, it was somehow ‘old fashioned’ and learning it wouldn’t lead to amazing opportunities to explore the world.
My point is that it is possible to be outward looking and view Welsh negatively. Unfortunately, sometimes that attitude sticks and people never get to engage with the language.

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I think the open-mindedness coefficient is valid, but there are serious variances when there are pre-existing cultural influences at play.

In other words, the person’s open-mindedness can be measured fairly accurately if they have not been exposed to Welsh before, because you are seeing how open they are to new concepts.

Once there is a previous exposure, then you are seeing how they are reacting to you interacting with something that they are already familiar with.

That is why people brought up in Wales may have a stronger reaction: They may have already thought about their regret at not speaking the language that their nan spoke, or have memories of particularly boring Welsh classes, or of their father complaining about a friend of a friend who’d walked into a pub where everyone was speaking English… you know where that’s going. In which case, there is a pre-exisiting idea regarding your learning, which will skew the results. If they are open minded, they might be interested despite negative past experience, but this is less likely. If they are closed minded, they might still agree that it’s a good / interesting thing, because they already think that.

I like to always assume that “anti”-Welsh people are negative about Welsh because they don’t understand it properly. I always try to give them another point of view rather than arguing about their own, and have had quite a few interesting conversations because of that.

An example would be a co-worker who was complaining about the waste when he threw out half of all his correspondence from the local authority because it is in Welsh. I agreed with him, because I have to do the same thing with the English half. This led to am interesting conversation about speaking Welsh - something that he had never considered as a thing people did (He was from Risca, if I remember rightly), and ended up with him getting details about Welsh classes in his area (which makes me realise how long ago it must have been!).

In other words, here was an open-minded person who would have said “What are you learning that for?”.

It might be worth following up the “What for?” questions with something like “That’s an interesting reaction - why do you feel like that about it?”, just to explore their negativity a bit. Be warned, though - it may be a long conversation!

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Yes, I can see how some would be narrow minded, but it’s more complex than that I think.

Most people from monolingual nations are not going to be very much into learning languages, at least in my experience. Many will admire it from afar and think you have superpowers, whilst some will find it threatening in some way. For an island nation such as ours that has such a global, dominant English language, learning another language is more of a distant concept than maybe somewhere like Switzerland. Many people think that learning a new language is this huge thing, which it is, but when they know you are learning a minority language…well, they might find that baffling!!!

They are simply not into languages generally. For them to put an effort into learning another language, there would have to be an obvious massive, practical purpose to it. Then they hear you saying you’re learning Welsh and to them it’s like someone saying they’re learning Latin to fluent level!

To be learning Welsh where you are, you must be really into Welsh for it’s own sake. If it comes with benefits, then great, but it sounds like you take pleasure in it anyway. I am like this with Russian, at least. I haven’t been actively learning Russian for some while now, but when I tell people I’ve taught myself some of it, they are confused when they find out that no, I don’t have a Russian relatives or a partner.

Learning languages is not something they really associate with enjoyment! Language geeks though, have a different view of things! Some people would find it strange that I enjoy reading about 16th - 18th century London, but there we go!

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What you say, @Caren rang a huge bell! I was back at 1st Year Uni, Chemistry, and being told we had to do a useful language as an Ancillary subject. It transpired we only had to do a ‘Scientific’ version and our choice of ‘useful’ in 1961 was German or Russian! I picked Russian as

  • more fun
  • more unusual
  • easier - I’d met German composite words and cringed!
    But that word - useful - eliminated virtually every language on the planet! Grrr!

Very interesting perspective. Reminds me of the old joke:
What is a person who speaks three languages called? - Trilingual.
What is a person who speaks two languages called? - Bilingual.
What is a person who speaks one language called? - Anglophone.
It may well be true all over the English-speaking world.

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So true ! and threatning as well. We would consider that knowing two languages is being two time wealthier/richer. They don’t (the monolinguals). Speaking a minority language - on what they consider their country linked with their tongue - is un attempt to ruin their mental construction, un attempt straight against them (although it’s not).
I think it’s not only about being open-minded or not, but also according to political affinities and feeling insecure or not.
Each fellow “open-minded” has his boundaries or fields where the adjective"open-minded" can’t be applied.
And when we speak daily a minority language we hear unpleasant things , and -the worst- the children also do…
:vertical_traffic_light::hushed:

Erwan

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I know that the language of the Kurdish people is banned in Turkey, but am unsure which other languages are so treated in various countries. My point, really, is that the fear/fight response to another language is not limited to Anglophones! It is just surprising that a people who spread so far, ruled so much and prospered so highly are so insecure when faced with people who can speak more than one language!

Kurdish was banned from 1980 to 1991.

I think it is still illegal to teach it, or at least to teach tnrough the medium of Kurdish! Makes it hard for Kurdish kids to learn! Kurdish Not anyone?

Yes, it is not allowed as a language of education, but of course the children learn it at home.

just like Welsh back when!

I’m given to understand there was a version of this in Russia at one point:

What is a person who speaks four languages called? A shopkeeper (Russian, French, German, English).
What is a person who speaks three languages called? A boatman (Russian, French, German, referring to the Volga Germans).
What is a person who speaks two languages called? An aristocrat (Russian, French).
What is a person who speaks one language called? An internationalist! (Russian).

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