I’ve never viewed ‘just’ as a particularly deep Welsh word because the pronunciation was the same as English- family just accepted it as an English borrowing to use.
Braf is from the old English brave…but the meaning is so different that people forgot it was a borrowing! Just and Jest isnt the same in this context
My family were not purists either although they prided themselves on good grammar in the Chapel heyday.
They still say ‘iwsio’ (like ‘use’) for defnyddio (and other recent English borrowings) because it was a handy generic word for doing something as a verb. The Welsh would use the specific verb but ‘use’ is very handy!
Many English borrowings can be explained not just by trade which is normal but that the Welsh had zero institutions or anything centralised educationally after the 1500s.It was functionally banned in public after the English conquest. English borrowings came into the language increasingly after this and it also explains why the Welsh dialects are still strong in difference although weakened in cultural strength.
Although without the bible in Welsh we may have gone the same way as the Cornish speakers. We got lucky that in the 1600s and 1700s theres was enough anglo-Welsh influence inside the London establishment that warned that Welsh was directly from hebrew and God would smite anyone who destroyed it ( no evidence for this hebrew connection but there was a fear back then in some high circles about truly killing off the Welsh language - my father who doesnt speak Welsh…said this luck was miraculous compared to many other minority stateless languages)
The issue isnt the English borrowings - I use them
The issue is the wholescale replacement of Welsh vocabularly and erasure that happened with the complete loss of Welsh cultural power over the last 500 years. Its an imposed top-down change more than a natural change within communities by consent. The less Welsh is spoken day to day leads to a lowering in vocabulary knowledge. There are linguistic studies to back this. It is why much Cornish vocab and phrases are lost to time.
Many younger Welsh speakers today emerging from Welsh mediun schools are using only the English words for fairly common Welsh equivalents. Even as a learner I am taken aback they dont know these common terms and words
You can say “jest” … but it shouldn’t mean all synonyms and equivalents have to be lost overnight.
Its cheapens a language and losses beautiful diversity.
There is strength and beauty is a diverse vocabulary imo
“Language is an organic thing - it can’t be controlled”
Language change does not spring from nothing, everything happens for a reason.
I would argue that language can very much be controlled by social pressures/ prestige/ economic and legal structures and other top-down forces
If language cannot be controlled why have we seen the complete disappearance of many English dialects in favour of the heavily promoted Queens English. That is a form of control.
I do not see Welsh replacing its vocabulary and phrases with hardly any global languages apart from English. Its a one way transfer. I have not seen a huge amount of transfer of Ukranian into the Welsh language. English is the dominant soft cultural power in the world. Coupled with the dominant form of hard power in the world, the USA. This provides a very potent force in lingual change to Welsh.
I welcome the day Welsh imports Māori or Hawaiian words as much as English
I agree with very much of what you say here - I studied language policy and planning for a masters degree, and think that all that you describe around prestige, economic structures etc is absolutely true. I also would love to see words coming to Welsh from languages other than English (which they have in a small way, I suppose - with cappuccino or pizza, for example). Probably going to be more likely to be Urdu, Polish or Arabic, though, given our demographics here.
I agree also that day-to-day speech is the key to keeping the language alive, and the cultural impact of social media is a major problem here, and there is a whole issue around young people’s attitudes to and use of Welsh when it is seen as the “school language”. It’s a very complex area, with a lot of factors.
But, IMO, leaping down the throat of someone for saying “jesd” or “lyfli” (not suggesting for a moment that’s what you did, @brynle - just trying to explain why I think this is important) isn’t going to encourage them to continue speaking the language, which is just going to make that all worse. As you describe with “usio”, I am willing to bet that most people who say “jesd” or “lyfli” know what “dim ond” and “hyfryd” are, and use them when they want to use a more formal tone.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing here - language shift is about a lot more than individual words, isn’t it.
I always used defnyddio in my early days of speaking but I remember a 1st language speaker I know who worked as an official translator for a Welsh council telling me it sounded much more natural to say iwsio (which has been around in Welsh since the 17th century anyway), and keep defnyddio for writing - so now I use whichever comes to mind first.
Isn’t that interesting, @siaronjames? It wouldn’t come naturally to me to use iwsio at all, but I think that’s perhaps a north/south thing? (Or even a Cofi thing?) Fascinating…
I have a question about the meaning of eitha. In SSiW it is introduced (I did the southern course) as “fairly”, as in eitha da - “quite good”. But when I looked it up in Gweiadur online, the GPC online and in Gomer they all give the principle meaning as “extreme, uttmost, superlative”. Then I checked the Oxford Modern Welsh Dictionary (ed @garethrking), and that majors on “fairly”. And GK lists it as an adverb whereas the others say it’s an adjective or a noun.
I also tried a simple phrase in Google translate: pen eithaf o’r maes and that comes back with “extreme end of the field”.
So what’s going on? Is this an example of a word that has gradually shifted its meaning? If eitha has dropped out of use in the sense of “extreme” how would my phrase look then? pen dros ben o’r maes? pen rhonc o’r maes?
It’s one of the words in Welsh that can mean different things depending on where in the sentence it appears.
Generally (but not always)…
When it’s used as a noun, or follows a noun, (as in your “pen eithaf” example) it means ‘extreme, maximum, etc’ e.g. i’r eithaf = to the extreme; hyd eithaf = to the limit
But when it’s followed by an adverb or adjective, it means ‘fairly, quite, somewhat’ e.g. rhedeg yn eitha gyflym = running quite fast; mae’n eitha ddiddorol = it’s somewhat interesting.
However, there are phrases which seem to blur these lines, and then it becomes a matter of context.
Among the translations offered by GPC is “quite”, which pretty much covers the same spectrum in English - it’s often supposed to be a British/American difference of usage, but for me in BrE “quite useless” = “utterly useless” whereas “quite useful” = “fairly useful”.
Thanks @RichardBuck and @garethrking … Gareth that picture is so low-res I can barely read it. What publication? I have your Modern Welsh - a comprehensive grammar but I couldn’t fine eitha in it.
Oh - @RichardBuck - I agree. I read “Quite useless” as totally useless. The only use of “quite” listed in the GPC under eitha that I could see was eithaf gwir “quite true” which is ambiguous, to say the least.
Unfortunately eitha appears to have slipped through the net in the Grammar - it should be at para 425 under Adverbs of degree, but somehow dodged me! So thank you for drawing my attention to that, and I will rectify the omission in the next edition, whenever that comes along.
The various meanings of quite are also dealt with in the new book, just finished. Here’s a sneak preview…
