When I chose the Al Lewis/Sarah Howells combination singing "Darlun" for that 20-song collection, it reminded me of this ( unfortunately English) Catatonia song, Road Rage ... this is those two again with an absolutely per(t)fect version of it... To make up for the tiny tiny amount of Welsh on that, here's Yucatan singing a Welsh song in Welsh... probably in Wales. It's got an incredibly Welsh title too ... Cwm Llwm ... ac ystyr gwleidyddol hefyd.
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Well, this is the 400th thing on here ..... so I'm allowed to go a bit mad and do what I like.Mind you, I generally do that anyhow. I've decided to put on 20 bits of music .... nearly all of them from the early days of this blog. They are testament to the strength in depth of Welsh music, from John Cale to Jen Jeniro, from Al Lewis to Anhrefn, from Pop to Punk, from Swnami to Sibrydion, from Crumblowers to Cate le Bon, from Poppies to Gorky's, from dolphins to Darlun, from Glo to Gwlyb, from Hud to Heb to Neb, from Datblygu to Myfanwy and from 1 to 20. Why 20 ? Well, it's the square root of 400 of course. Wake up at the back .... I hope you enjoyed that lot ... there's lots of others I couldn't fit in to the 20 .... I hope they won't mind too much ................I put a ring round this ( see below, not above) in the Radio Times and then forgot all about it. It's on this afternoon ... that's Sunday 27th November 2016 for later readers and it's going to be repeated next Saturday too. After that it'll probably be on Listen Again or whatever it's called. It's nothing to do with that picture up at the top, which I found when I was looking for a "hiraeth" image ... there's loads of them, including mugs, people gazing longingly at the hills, sheep,goats,burning cottages etc etc. All the usual stuff. That series of Radio 3 talks about the Mabinogion that I told you about a little while ago was pretty good, especially the 3rd one wth Gwyneth Lewis ....here's the link to what I wrote .... mabinogion-media-marathon.html This next bit IS about that thing at the top.. I couldn't resist having a bit of a look...... here's the trailer ..the mud is especially realistic.... there's even a dinky-winky bit of Welsh in it .... you'll have to be quick though ... and here's the highlights (?) of the "rehearsals" ... what a strange word that is by the way .... which, I can reveal, didn't seem to go all that well ... more Welsh to spot here, if you're fully alert .... this is very funny actually. Wish I'd seen it ...it's won prizes ! Prizes! You might recognise this lot who are providing the music ..well, as before, you'll need to listen carefully to get any Welsh bits .... well, I think they're Welsh bits... How about that for a post that sticks to the topic in question eh !?
In that Wild Wales book I wrote about last time, one theme that crops up over and over again is the difficulty that learners have in understanding Welsh speech .... especially those who are learning outside Wales who can't really hear Welsh being spoken informally all around them on a regular basis.. That's why I quite often stick interviews, studio discussions, that sort of thing... on here.... they give you short bites of Welsh speech, and you can listen to them as often as you want to or need to ..and you can go away and look stuff up, or lie down with a bucket of ice on your head ... whatever works for you. So ... here's that Huw M again talking about the making of his new CD, Utica ... He's also one of the "clearer" Welsh singers ... here's the beautiful " Dyma lythyr " ... Now there's a strange book ... in more ways that one. George Borrow set of on a walking tour in Wales in 1854 and wrote about all his adventures ... especially the people he met. Here's a slightly edited review which hits some of the nails on the head ... On 27th July 1854 George Borrow began a tour of North Wales which would last until 16th November 1854. The Borrows lodged at Dee Cottage, Llangollen, and from there Borrow started local excursions, followed by a long walk via Corwen, Capel Curig to Bangor and Holyhead (and lots of other places). Then in September he headed south via Caernarvon, Beth Gelert and Festiniog and back to Llangollen. October saw the start of a long walk to Bala, Machynlleth, Devil’s Bridge, Strata Florida, Lampeter, Llandovery, Swansea, Neath, Merthyr Tydvil, Caerphilly and Newport, finally ending up at Chepstow on 16th November 1854. During this period Borrow filled notebooks with the people he met, the incidents and so forth. These notebooks, together with Welsh material that Borrow had already written, were written up during 1855 and 1856 to form Wild Wales, which was first announced as ready for the press in 1857. After Borrow’s death the book gradually gained in popularity and is now seen as one of the classic books on Wales. Unlike Borrow’s other works, Wild Wales, has been in print for many decades. So there's the basic facts ... here's a map of his route/routes ... Anyway ... there's plenty to say about the multitude of conversations he had with all sorts of odd people along the way ... but for now, let's skip right to the last chapter which is all about the language. It seems, by the way, that his Welsh was pretty good ... he had a tutor and learned a lot from books too .. and he presents this theory that Welsh might have been at least partially derived from Sanscrit ... he has a big table of side-by-side Welsh and Sanskrit words to prove his point ... here's a small section of it ... Well, what do you think of all that? And why does he include some pretty crap comparisons in there .... Gwr/Vira , Dwr/Ida, Rhod/Ratha etc. I expect you could pick out a hundred pairs of words from any two languages and make vague comparisons like that.... taking care not to show anyone the 73000 words that don't match up at all. Another thing he talks about in that final chapter is about the sheer quantity of Welsh words ..as we will see.. I've missed out the boring bits by the way ... " The Welsh language is one of the most copious languages of the world, as it contains at least eighty thousand words. The genders are three , the masculine, the feminine and the neuter. There are twelve plural terminations of nouns, of which the commonest is au. Its copiousness, however, does not proceed, like that of the English, from borrowing from other languages to any great extent. No language has a better supply of simple words for the narration of events than the Welsh, and simple words are the proper garb of narration; and no language abounds more with terms calculated to express the abstrusest ideas of the metaphysician. As to its sounds - I have to observe that at the will of a master it can be sublimely sonorous, terribly sharp, diabolically guttural and sibilant and sweet and harmonious to a remarkable degree.What more sublimely sonorous than certain hymns of Taliesin; more sharp and clashing that certain lines of Gwalchmai and Dafydd Benfras,describing battles; more diabolically grating than the Drunkard's Choke-pear by Rhys Goch, and more sweet than the lines of poor Gronwy Owen to the Muse? Ah, those lines of his to the Muse are sweeter even than the verses of Horace , of which they profess to be an imitation. What lines in Horace's Ode can vie with Tydi roit â diwair wên Lais eos i lysowen! Well, what do you make of all that? What's all this stuff about neuter nouns? And the "12 endings" to nouns .... there are 12 common ones, but plenty of others. To cheer us all up a bit, you'll be chuffed to hear that he finds lots of Welsh speakers to be totally unintelligible. I wonder if Borrow ever came across this young lady on his travels .... some of my long-time readers ( hello Gladys and Winifred Partridge of Henley-on-Thames) will have seen this before but it bears another go I think. Incidentally, which of Borrow's adjective would apply to her "tone" ..... Author's Note ... this is another of those posts of mine that take a while to get round to the the actual Welsh bit. Have no fear .. it will do ... and the first bit is true, interesting and unusual ... and I meet a forbidding literary giant. I got that book up there " The Pooh Perplex" by "Frederick C Crews"from my local library when I was about 14. It's a sort of "casebook" for students ... you know the sort of thing ... you can get books that tell you how to pass your exam on Wuthering Heights or To Kill a Mockingbird ... they explain what it's really about, there's little essays about different interpretations of the book, various critic's opinions about it ..that sort of thing. Basically, as far as the student is concerned, they don't actually need to read Wuthering H or To K a M B at all .... they can just learn the casebook instead. Easy Peasy. And that's what The Pooh Perplex does ... you get a whole series of essays about the book from various different critics, all interpreting the book in different ways. There's the Marxist interpretation, there's the Freudian viewpoint .. one critic madly suggests that it's simply a nice story for children! At about two-thirds of the way through, I realised that the whole thing was a joke ... a parody of the "casebook" idea. Lots of the projects and tasks set at the end of each essay were rather odd .... telling you not to write on both sides of the paper at once etc ... plus a lot of the author's names were a bit odd as well... Simon Lacerous etc. Each of the "authors" were in fact mimicking the style of an actual literary critic .. Simon Lacerous was F R Leavis ... whom I was to meet 5 years later rather disastrously. But that's another story. It was in Wales though. So .. one of the most startling essays is by the esteemed critic C.J.L Culpepper, who attempts to show that far from being an innocent little kid's story about cuddly bears etc, it is in fact about "nothing other than the central drama of our faith: the Fall and Redemption of Man. " Well, that's a pretty tall order to prove, but he does it pretty well. His principal coup is to demonstrate that Eeyore is a sort of "king" .. he points out astutely that in Italian "io re" means" I (am the) King." But .... but ... but .. if he had only known some Welsh, he would have found a far more compelling truth about said Eeyore ... because the Welsh word Iôr = the Lord !!!! The Lord... you can keep your kings mate ... Eeyore is the Lord. Ha!! He plumps for Christopher Robin as god.... with the rather (too) obvious anagram " I Hope Christ Born R ".... that's R for Rex he reckons .... but I'm not convinced. I think I can go down a more productive channel ... the Welsh connection.... [a] We've already had a huge breakthrough by showing that Eeyore/ Iôr is in fact God. [b] Another bleedin' obvious one .. Roo / rhyw = sex. Roo is the only evidence that anything resembling sexual reproduction goes on in the Forest. So the author has given us a clue ... Rhyw/Roo ! [c] Christopher Robin ...obviously he is really Crys - twrf - wr Brongoch .... a multitude of reddish shirts .... makes you think of Joseph and his Coat of Many Colours ... except that a humble person like Joseph would be far more likely to have a much more downmarket "shirt" probably homemade from a few cut-up pairs of trousers of various shades of red, or stained by the desert sands. [c] Tigger/Tega .... the most fair, the finest , the most beautiful .... apart from Roo, who as we know has another rôle in the story. Tigger is the most innocent, the most playful, in fact the finest, most unspoilt creature in the Forest. [d] Kanga/Cancr ... Kanga is much the opposite of Tigger ... Kanga, an unmarried, bossy, rule-obsessed latecomer is an internal threat ( cancer) to the whole of the forest community. I suspect that Cancr/Cancer is the reason why there is no volume 3 ... the whole caboodle is robbed of its innocence and falls apart. [e] We musn't forget the author himself ... having created this "paradise" I'm sure he must have dearly wished he could be a part .. any part.. of it. Hence the Milne/Milyn clue/revelation that he too wished to join Tega, Rhyw, Iôr, Cancr, Crystwrfwr Brongoch and all and live with them in their enchanted world for ever. [f] What do we make of Piglet/Pi-Clwt ? And how does Pw fit in ? I'm still trying to squeeze these ill-fitting pieces of the jigsaw into the ,literally, "big picture" that Milyn has presented us with. There's a lot more to be found out I'm sure ... but I've made a start and paved the way to much greater discoveries. Maybe we will one day find that the whole Pooh/Pu saga was originally written in Welsh .... the manuscript will perhaps be discovered deep in the vaults of Bangor Cathedral , and I might even live long enough to open the inevitable "Ystafell Milyn" in the chancel. Remember folks .. it all started here. And after that thrilling literary breakthrough, here's Race Horse and "Cysur a Cyffro"... This is a video about the way young children with no Welsh are taught enough of the language to go into Welsh-language primary schools in an intensive 12 week course. The kids and their parents are brilliant! Equally amazing ( for a whole range of reasons) are the comments if you watch this on youtube. I'm just wondering how much Welsh you would need to know to survive when you got into the primary school .... I would have thought a lot more that 12 week's worth.I was also a bit doubtful about that stuff about the brain changing the way it learns languages at the age of 6... is that evidence-based? When I get it sorted out I will show you one of the possible ... but, I hope ... unlikely things that might go wrong. If I remember, that is. My brain is considerably over that 6-year barrier. Now .. here's a counting song for children such as they .... and I don't think it's doing it the right way... see what you think .. This is the, er, well I don't know how many there have been, but this is probably the 8th or so. Simple Stuff ... it's songs played simply, pretty much the same as they were when someone thought them up in their back garden or bedroom. No producers, no multi-tracking .... here's Yr Ods and " Rhywle i Ngwallt Gael Tyfu yn Wyn" ... ... and this is Kizzy Crawfordand "Hedfan i'r Nefoedd ... Here's Simon Apus doing his (very) impromptu version of "Sbia ar y Seren" ( GZM) ..and the fourth selection ( there's always four) is Huw M with a version of Seddi Gwag I've not seen before ... godidog ... That CD down there was the first Welsh CD I ever got ... lovely stuff. Diolch yn fawr Huw !
Yesterday I switched the radio on and Cerys Matthews was singing Road Rage ..... ... and the audience were clapping along with it, which I thought was very odd. It was I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, in the middle of the bit where they play a song, then fade it out, and the (un)fortunate contestant has to sing it for a minute or so all by themselves, then they fade the song back in and see how well they've kept up. They get points if they are pretty much within a gnat's whisker of where they should be. Well, just listen to this then by clicking the link to the "listen again" gadget ... start at 8½ minutes in to get the atmosphere of the thing ... you will be pretty impressed ... www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b082xc0c But it wasn't Cerys at all .. no, it was Pippa Evans .... what a fantastic imitation she did there! A bit of "research" showed that she has a lot of form in the singing line ..... and Cerys Matthews was a perfect choice for her judging by this account of one of her shows ... Pippa Evans: how I invented sozzled singer-songwriter Loretta Maine Bits of Courtney Love, Alanis Morissette and the deepest, darkest thoughts of yours truly are all sloshing about inside my needy alter ego Loretta Maine is essentially, myself at 21 mixed in with a dash of Courtney Love, Alanis Morissette and a few people I have met along the way (people for whom a klaxon sounded *AVOID AVOID*, but who I hung about with for a bit of chaos-intrigue). Loretta is a singer-songwriter from Portland, Oregon who is generally angry with the unfairness of the world and deals with her pain by getting drunk and singing/shouting about it. Her album title, I'm Not Drunk, I Just Need to Talk to You, is a sentence that I think we have all uttered at least once in our lives. Loretta is all of us at our worst – desperate to be loved, but impossible to love. Wine was never meant to be served in pints, and Loretta drinks it by the gallon. Here's Cerys doing it .... .. and just to make sure there's some actual Welsh in here, well ,there is quite a bit actually if you look back , here she is with " Arglwydd Dyma Fi " To round off this short Datblygu "season" we have a long (over an hour) 2012 video which is more or less a history of the band and it's Terrific For Your Welsh too. So, here's Prosiect Datblygu" for your delectation/education/reorientation/subversion/aestivation/haruscipation . ..and here's some Datblygu music ..... ..which was on this .... Which is the name of Gwenno's C2 radio program so there. Everything is linked to everything else ... 7 steps to Kevin Bacon. Here's those very steps .. well, 4½ of them anyway. Oh, Gwenno is on them too. Waiting for Kevin I suppose.
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Author I'm 376 years old,104 metres tall and own 54 pairs of binoculars. Apart from that, I'm pretty normal. Archives
October 2019
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