Welcome to the forum:) Your list of languages is very impressive. I’m learning Welsh and Cornish too, and will probably have to learn Modern Greek in a while.
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Thank you, Seren!
My favourite aunt, a first-language Welsh speaker, told me once about being forced to wear some sort of sign around her neck at school for being caught speaking Welsh in the school yard. She never learned to read or write her own language, which is such a shame.
When I was a child, I learned quickly how to read Welsh (although I didn’t understand most of what I was reading, it’s a lovely phonetic language that’s easy to read once you know how). I can remember walking through a church yard reading inscriptions to her while she translated them back for me.
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I am shocked! I thought the Not had gone out of use by the time my Mam-gu was in school! Where was your poor Auntie? (I did know that slapped hands could still result from speaking our own language, but not the Not!)
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I’m not sure exactly where she went to school, henddraig (She’s an aunt by marriage…), but she’s quite elderly. I’ll ask her when I see her in a couple of weeks.
You got me interested, henddraig. I found this on Wikipedia: "Susan Jones, Member of Parliament for Clwyd South, claimed in 2010 that the use of the Welsh Not, including caning as the punishment, persisted in some schools in her constituency until “as recently as the 1930s and 1940s” That would have been exactly when my aunt would have been in school.
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Shocking! I honestly thought the ‘not’ was only used in the industrial valleys of the south and not after about 1890!!
I was in school in the 1940s!! We had the cane, of course, as well as the flying blackboard rubber, flying chalk, the ruler etc. etc. But that was used on the kid who, in my case, talked too much. The ‘not’ was so bad because it encouraged kids to try to get rid of it to someone else!!
p.s. Of course, the missiles could hit the wrong kid, but the teacher always apologised for that!!
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Well, as long as they apologised…
There are several entangled reasons why I am learning Welsh, but the triggering reason is music. I heard Only Boys Aloud singing Calon Lan, and looked up versions with lyrics on YouTube. Over a couple of weeks I listened to over a dozen songs in Welsh, and tried to learn the lyrics of a few. The orthography never made much sense, and the Wikipedia articles on phonology of Welsh were unhelpful, so I decided to look up some language lessons on the Web, just to learn how to pronounce lyrics. (I had done this before with Il Volo and Italian, where I never got beyond the pronunciation.) To my surprise, I found learning Welsh interesting and enjoyable (I’m using both SSiW and recently Duolingo), and I expect to continue to learn it, although I have no links to Wales and have never knowingly met a Welsh speaker face to face.
At this point, underlying reasons why I like learning languages take over. Briefly, I was attracted to Welsh because of the relative success in developing Welsh-medium education in recent decades (although the Basques seem even more successful in their comparable efforts). I am interested in smaller languages that are moving into various domains of social life, perhaps to gain some lessons for the 150 languages in the Philippines, most of which are not written (although a few years ago the government shifted to “Mother Tongue education” for the first three grades).
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That sounds like a fine set of reasons and interests… 
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Croeso Frederick! Ble wy’ti (where are you?)
Do you watch S4C? If you do or would like to, please do sign the petition on
This is to try to stop the UK Government killing TV in Cymraeg by starving it of funds!
Please give your country so you appear on their map!!
Are you on the SSiW map?
See thread ‘Please add me to the map’!!
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What languages are you learning? You have some good soul-mates here who also like learning languages,
Justin
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At the moment I am studying Chinese (including the written language, which doubles the effort needed), and am trying to maintain German and Indonesian. I speak English, Filipino and Cebuano daily. Over the years, I have studied, and mostly forgotten, Thai, Japanese and a bit of French and Dutch. And I can struggle through Spanish because Filipino and Cebuano have so many loanwords from that language.
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This is wonderful to hear. Maybe you can help me because until now I have learned mainly European languages and Hebrew. I would love to learn Thai but am still hesitating because of it being tonal. I am not tone-deaf but I do not have a good ear for music. I don’t know whether this is an impediment or not.
My goal would be to be conversational (functional rather than fluent) and not to read or write - so the added difficulty of the script, which I’m told is very difficult, would not worry me. But the tonal aspect does present a new challenge that it is difficult to evaluate.
What has been your experience with learning tonal languages? This would be very helpful to know.
Justin
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I don’t think a good ear for music is needed for tonal languages. Chinese and Thai are tonal. There was a time I was studying both at the same time, and the two languages would get confused sometimes, but it wasn’t really a big problem.
In Chinese, where every syllable is a meaningful character, but the majority of words are multisyllabic, I mostly try to learn the tones as part of a multi-syllabic word. The longer line of pitch gives a better handle for my memory. I don’t try to learn tones as “knowledge about” a word, I just habituate and internalize the “know how” to pronounce it. If you showed me a character and asked me what it’s tone is, I would have to pronounce it to myself to try and figure out the tone. I don’t remember the facts about tones, I have to observe myself pronouncing it to figure it out.
I remember when studying Thai that the strange alphabet was an additional cognitive burden, it was easier to work with books with transcription into Latin letters. Reading Thai is a bit difficult, because word boundaries are not marked, and related letters are not always left to right (vowels and digraphs are often diacritics that can appear after, above, below or before the syllable-initial consonant). But of course, the writing system of Chinese is even more complicated – I like a challenge. 
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I signed, there is now a third mark in the Eastern Asia part of the map.
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I think you need to decide to drop this fear as being irrational. English is a tonal language, too - think of how you change words when you ask a question.
Sure, there’s more tonal stuff in Thai, for example - but the vast majority of it you’ll get right because you’ll be hearing/producing in context - and SSiThai will be a very, very effective way of getting to grips with the tones…
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This is something I think about a lot. We vary our tone quite a bit, and no one teaches us this, except presumably our parents by example, and (as far as I know) very little of it is codified or written down (if it can be written down). The only “rule” that I should think we all consciously know is the rising tone at the end of questions (and even this rule has been severely tested in British English in recent years with trends in modern speech, presumably influenced by Australian soaps and possible some American TV.
I think it’s something we tend to take for granted and hardly notice except when someone does the opposite, and speaks in a monotone, which most people find unattractive, which I think must mean that most of the time, most people speak [English] with a varied tone.
Other than questions, I can think of some reasons for using tone:
- emphasis [including either expressing agreement or contradiction]
- expressing emotion
- expressing physical states, like tiredness or the opposite - high energy
I’'m sure there are probably many others.
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It might just be my ears, but I have noticed that the voice overs in a lot of TV advertising lately are becoming more monotone with more of a suberbia-Surrey-received pronounciation sort of style of speech if that makes any sense at all. This presumably means that they have done some research to show it is particularly attractive to their target audience.
I was thrilled when I checked the petition and saw that you had signed and where you are!! Thanks! Diolch yn fawr!
Re Tonal speech, I think the problem I had with Chinese is that I am so used to rising intonation meaning a question that I can’t adjust to it being part of the meaning of the word! I couldn’t tell the difference between words!
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