Modern Welsh and Old Welsh

I’m wondering about the Welsh in medieval prose/poetry. Is the difference similar to that between say Modern English and the older English? In other words, can fluent readers understand much of this old material [say the Mabinogi] or is it like an English speaker looking at Beowulf in the original and basically seeing a foreign language?

I can’t say from experience, but I’m told that old Welsh is not very different from very formal Welsh of today. Certainly much easier than Beowulf. It’ll take you a while, if starting from scratch, to get to very formal Welsh, but it is totally doable. Perhaps @sarapeacock could say more.

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The Mabinogi in Old Welsh was something I had to study at University. But I was still learning Welsh as a second language at the time, so there was a lot I couldn’t understand. The first language speakers in the class were able to understand a fair bit more, but of course there were still archaic spellings, obsolete words and turns of phrases that even they struggled with.

See what you think here:

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I believe old welsh is different not just in words but the way the alphabet was used eg, no ll or dd and mutations weren’t written down.

Middle welsh from 12th to 14th c is much closer however to modern written welsh. Or so i’m told!

I once posted some interesting finds on how to read Middle Welsh here:

But, as far as I can see, both reading guides give examples of Middle Welsh in modern spelling, while if you try to read the books themselves, they are mostly in the Middle Welsh spelling. But apart from that, people who are more advanced than I am have told me that the grammar is rather similar, and some vocabulary hasn’t changed much, so if you can understand the modern formal language, you won’t have much difficulty with Middle Welsh.

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Yes, and think, Chaucer was born in 1340ish, and I can’t read his English without loads of help. Welsh of that era is much easier! Mind, when I read it, I was/had been learning formal written Welsh, the way it was taught for years, with no thought of anyone actually wanting to speak it! But even with odd spellings, older Welsh is easier than Chaucer, I think!
ps @seren posted while I was writing. Her post is much better. It leads to a whole thread on the subject! Historians and linguists - go and enjoy!!

LOL! I’m not sure that I can, unfortunately! Middle Welsh is indeed one of the options on my course, and a few of my fellow MA students do study it … but I’ve carefully avoided it (coward that I am). But my understanding seems to be along the lines of what Seren describes below - that if you know the formal structures in modern Welsh you won’t be too far off. (Apparently, also, the structures are quite similar to Cornish - so knowledge of one will help with the other.)

Perhaps one day, if I get some free time, I’ll try to get to grips with it.

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Oh @sarapeacock fach!! You and me are dancing round @seren, posting just out of sinc! She is now ‘above’ us both!

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Just a few lines from Cad Goddeu, my favourite poem, from Llyfr Taliesin, a 14th century manuscript, so you can judge how easy or not it is to understand.
Bum cledyf yn aghat
Bum yscwyt yg kat
Bum tant yn telyn.

(I was a sword in fist
I was a shield in battle
I was a string on a harp.)

@henddraig Middle Welsh was my reason for starting to learn Welsh, so I can’t miss a thread like this one:)

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Thanks everyone for the replies. I guess the drift seems to be that it’s remained somewhat closer than English has, which is handy if someone wants to investigate the older texts one day. My ultimate goal is obviously to understand the prophecies of Merlin and foretell the future. It may take some time.

@siaronjames Thanks, I bookmarked it … for a little later on …
@henddraig Ye, I stuck with the modern version of Chaucer. It’s already too far gone.
@Pete2 I guess that’s like English in ‘The Faerie Queene’ as far as the letter substitution goes.
@seren Thanks, I’ll check that poem out. I understood the second paragraph 100% ;]

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That’s the impression I have as well, from the limited exposure I’ve had.

Not surprising perhaps when you consider that the Cornish most people speak nowadays is a conscious revival based mostly on the written Cornish of the 15th and 16th centuries or thereabouts. (Simply because that’s where the majority of surviving material comes from.)

So I suppose it stands to reason that it would look more similar to Middle Welsh than to Modern Welsh :slight_smile:

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Interesting topic. A friend of mine is interested in the the book of Taliesin and the poem ‘Preiddeu Annwn’: The Spoils of Annwn. I’d never read any medieval Welsh before and on first sight it looked rather daunting ( I was asked to translate it) After a bit of looking into it and learning how things where spelled back then it doesn’t look to bad. Last month me and my friend went to Cambridge to see a production of the Giants Daughter a which contained a large amount of spoken and medieval … ish Welsh. I did understand quite a bit when it was spoken.

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I have an interesting link here to ’ Preiddeu Annwn’ you can compare medieval Welsh text and by pressing the speaker button actually hear it being spoken.

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/preiddeu-annwn

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I was once asked to translate a newspaper article from a 19th century Welsh language paper in the US. I had a lot of help from some people on Forum Wales (at that time) and discovered the wonderful usefulness of Y Geiriadur Mawr - a large Welsh-English dictionary that includes a LOT of “archaic” words (with an asterisk so you can tell they aren’t in current use). Really helpful for 19th cetnury Welsh, let alone an earlier version fo the language.

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That’s an excellent site. I got some Arthurian gear off there once …

Without searching for references, my understanding re Old Welsh orthography is, basically:

  • There were sound changes that took place within words that are comparable to the initial mutations – e.g. the t -> d of widr- (as in “gwidrad neu ddau” :wink: ) presumably borrowed from Latin vitr- being similar to the modern soft mutation of dy dad.
  • The internal mutations were already beginning to happen at a time when literacy was entirely in Latin, outside of recording placenames/personal names, so when scribes wrote Latin but read it with an Old Welsh accent they’d happily write ecclesia but pronounce it egglesia.
  • When Old Welsh was first written they essentially borrowed their phonics from their existing Old Welsh Latin, such that “if there’s a -d- sound in the middle of a word we’ll spell it with a -t-, because that’s what we do in Latin (and with Welsh names).” Correspondences between borrowings and the odd recognizably related native word reinforces this.
  • Initial mutations don’t get written down because (a) they’re optional – they’re just how you say that word after this other word, they’re not part of what the word is; and (b) they’re just funny pronunciation variants anyway – just as in English we don’t bother to use different letters for the d- of door and the d of drawer, even though they’re different sounds.

The end result is that for certain placenames, recorded in Middle Welsh manuscripts that still preserve some traces of Old Welsh orthography, we sometimes don’t have the faintest idea how to pronounce them. Ted Hughes had a collection of verse named after the old British kingdom around Leeds that held out against the Saxons for a while, entitled Remains of Elmet – but I’ve seen the same name elsewhere as Elfed. Both are possible readings: essentially, you pays your money and you takes your choice…

Years ago I used to know the chap who is now professor of Old English at Oxford. He did Classics for A-Level, and Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic at Cambridge. When I mentioned the rather scanty remnants of Old Welsh to him, he said he found it pretty easy – just to treat it as Latin with no endings, a few sound changes, and a really inconsistent spelling system! The only good example I remember is the Computus fragment, which translates the Latin phrase “locus vacuus” (an empty place) as “loc guac” – which pretty much bears him out.

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Fascinating - so it is a similar thing to say the English pronunciation of the final s in hats [s] and horses [z] - speakers just know what sound to use - it is the writing system that makes it an issue. Just out of interest, where the initial mutation is not an fixed allophone, as in “ei ben” or “ei phen”, and written presumably “ei pen” in both cases, when spoken, that mutation would have to be understood from the context, would that be correct?

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Sorry – kept meaning to reply, but I’ve been having fun with Ofsted (inspection at work) this week. Yes, I think you’re right – I tried to find some clear-cut examples, though, and between limited modern Welsh and even more limited Middle Welsh I was struggling. The thing is, that while it looks really awkward from a modern first or second language perspective, I think that if you were a native speaker of Old Welsh and it was the only orthography you were used to, you’d probably just think that this writing lark was a bit of a bugger to learn… But you’d cope, just as I bet we’d cope in English even iv I arbidrarily dezided nod do dizdinguizh bedween voized and unvoized gonzonandz all ov a zudden :slight_smile: The thing with gender would be a bit awkward – but no worse than when someone uses singular ‘they’, and then collapses the waveform by using a gendered pronoun later on.

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wundaful, sorry, wonderful mix of linguistic and scientific metaphor there! :wink:

They do does that doesn’t he?

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Did @RichardBuck just kill the cat?

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