English is a polyglot language, isn’t it? Saxon, (Angle??), Norman, Dane, Norse, Dutch and some Latin from the church. So we can have marriage and wedding, the latter meaning the ceremony and the former the institution, we have beef and pork, about 6 words for the animal beef is from and pig, boar and sow for the pork!! Clearly I could go on and on. I read somewhere that some people managed with 300 words in ordinary life. I cannot imagine living with that limitation and one problem I have with my Cymraeg is that I can never remember the word I want!! But languages with less influx-influence than English have fewer ways of saying the same thing, which is where rats = large mice comes in!!
I’m not sure it’s a case of having fewer words - when it comes to dialects and different words for the same thing in commonly used words, I find Welsh has more than present day English! It’s more a different way of dividing up the world, showing that there is not just one way for languages to make those divisions. Which is always interesting.
You know you are learning Welsh when you are waiting for your wife and she sends you a text message saying ‘I am on my wy’ and you wonder what she is doing on an egg.
Going to work? (like the old Tony Hancock TV ads…
You know you’re learning Cymraeg when you see “y” written in the word and you automatically start to think what that word might mean in Cymraeg and even later realize it’s not Cymraeg word at all …
Happens to me too, @tatjana!
You know you’re learning Welsh when you get a grammar book for Christmas and that makes you jump with joy, so much that your cariad shakes his head and says that you’re a very peculiar woman:)
When you write “yn” instead of “in” almost every single time. I need a special spellchecker for my Wenglish.
Or, when “achos” becomes natural response insted of “because” when talking/writing in English.
I look sideways at ‘sh’ and wonder why it’s not ‘si’!!!
… when you walk in on a conversation and hear the word “thyroid” and think he must be talking about his daughter (who’s 3 years old).
… You have to proof read your English texts to make sure it hasn’t autocorrected to Welsh. (e.g. Fetch = gwych)
Hehe … Gwych, the best word!
… You’re scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed; come across a BBC Radio Wales post; feel deflated because you don’t recognize any words in Welsh, and then feel relieved (albeit a tad bit embarrassed) to realize that the post is actually…in English. Not that that happened to me earlier today or anything.
Oh, it happened to me too:) I generally mix up my languages sometimes, because I have to use several on a daily basis. Mom talks to me in Italian, my cariad is British, and I have some speaking partners whom I talk Welsh with. So, I once came up to my Gran (Russian) to ask her something and just stood there with a blank face trying to remember which language we normally speak to each other!
What a great dilemma to have (although I’m sure it doesn’t always feel that way in the moment…)
Yes, I consider myself very lucky:)
… when you tell your daughter that we’re going to KFC for dinner and soft mutate it to “gayeffsee”.
…when you can’t help but try to say Aran’s instructions on new words/forms in Welsh
When you see surename Lloyd and start to think is it spoken Cymraeg or English way …
As you may know “Lloyd’s” is one of the main big banks in the UK.
In England, we pronounce it the English way, but you’ve now got me wondering what they do in Wales…