What more could anyone wish for .... some Welsh talk ... and some Welsh singing ... as ! That was, as they say, A Quick One While He's Away ... now back downstairs to fix my sister's vacuum cleaner ... though exactly how you clean a vacuum I've no idea ...surely it's as clean as anything can be.
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I mentioned that I would have a go at doing someting a bit like that "typed poem" I put on here last time....and here's a first go .... it's quite sonorous when read aloud. It would look loads better done with a typewriter amd a bit more joggly and random .... achlysurol beirniadaeth cadwedigaeth chwedloniaeth achlysurol darfodedig beirniadaeth enwogrwydd cadwedigaeth ffyrnigrwydd chwedloniaeth genedigaeth darfodedig hudoliaeth enwogrwydd iselfrydedd ffyrnigrwydd lincyn-loncyn genedigaeth lledneisrwydd hudoliaeth mabinogi iselfrydedd neilltuedig lincyn-loncyn ofergoelus lledneisrwydd penderfynol mabinogi realrhwydd neilltuedig rhesymegol ofergoelus siomedigaeth penderfynol torcalonnus realrhwydd unrhywiaeth rhesymegol wythnosolyn siomedigaeth torcalonnus unrhywiaeth wythnosolyn Here's something also rather odd as well from the smashing Eilir Pierce... Diwrnod Braf [ This article was originally written for a different purpose and for an audience not necessarily conversant with Welsh... I've jigged it about a bit but the basic substance of it is more or less the same ... ] I was a bit puzzled as to why Welsh words seem to be shorter, on average, than English words .... when you read the same passage in Welsh and English, the impression is that the words are shorter. Maybe if the words are really shorter then it should take more of them to convey the same information. As well as that, it's my informal perception the French use even longer words) and Spanish is even worse ... or better, depending on your point of view.. So ... I decided to do a simple experiment... I picked a section from a book that I've got in several languages... there's a lot of them .... but the one I found all four copies of first was Roald Dahl's " The Witches" ... so I simply and, of course randomly, decided to use the first paragraph of chapter 2 in each one.... English, Spanish, Welsh, French. Actually, it wasn't as simple as it seems. There's proper names for a start... I ignored them. Then there's stuff like l'aube and l'amertume .... do you count the l' as a 1- or 2-letter word ? I said 2. It's even worse with Welsh where you get a'r ( a yr) and i'w ( i yw) and p'nawn ( prynhawn) and even horrible things like 'mod which could be all sorts of things ... they're very fond of chopping the fronts off their words ..or even bolting them together like chdi ( chi di) .The French do some of that as well, like writing V'la for voila.... but nothing like as often.There's even Welsh words like yli where they chop off the front and the back ends of the word... it's really gwylio ! I just used the whole word and not the contraction. It seemed to be the most consistent choice. Oh...and here's another thing ... Welsh uses loads of "Wenglish" where they use "sort-of" adapted English words ...like " meri-go-rownd" and " fansi-pants" etc... I just left them out of my count altogether. In contrast, Spanish and English were fairly problem-free. At least it gave me a lot more respect for those linguistic researchers who have to do this sort of thing. Anyway ... the results of this dinky sample were interesting..... remember, this was the same paragraph .. so the "message" if you like, was the same regardless of the language. No. of words No. of letters Letters per word Spanish 71 322 4.54 English 79 332 4.2 French 85 338 3.98 Welsh 91 252 2.8 Cripes ! Welsh used the most words , but they were, on average, tiny !! In that 91-word sample, the average word length was, incredibly, just under 3 letters long. Woo ! Plus, it means that 71 Spanish words did the same work as 91 Welsh ones.... but 252 Welsh letters did the same work as 338 French ones. So ..fascinatingly, it seems there is a trade-off ... if you use short words, there's going to have to be more of them to convey the same information. Even so, the Spanish/English/French used about the same total number of letters ( 330-ish) but in Welsh the same information was conveyed using only 252 letters. Now that's interesting and a bit odd. Obviously I'm going to have to do some more work on it, using different types of books and more samples. I can't help thinking it's something to to with the "ancient-ness" of Welsh words ... back then, when there weren't all that many words anyway, they could be short. The longer ones came along later, when all the short possibilities had been used up. It's that Occam's Razor again... the simple explanation is often the right one. Well, pop-pickers,here's the music ... it's those Cowbois again ............ That odd poem up at the top there ... I was dead keen to do a Welsh version ... but after a few minutes it occured to me that I no longer had a typewriter ! In our house they're always referred to as tripetappers, for obvious reasons. Rather more oddly, for years we always talked about sports/games in reverse .. llabtoof ( v Welsh) ,Ybgur ( vvv Welsh) strad, rekoons, yekcoh, elbat sinnet, elbbarcs, egdirb, sdrac, pans ... luckily, by the time we found out about smargananab we'd got over it. I wonder how that would work with Welsh ? Deord-lep ac ati ?
Have a read of this ..... Llosgod y fegin; gan dân y darfu y plwm ; yn ofer y toddodd y toddydd: canys ni thynwyd y rhai drygionus ymaith. That's Jeremiah Pennod 6 verse 29 that is. But unfortunately there was a 1903 edition of Y Beibl that had a bit of a misprint in it ..... here we go ... Llosgod yr egin; gan dân y darfu y plwm ; yn ofer y toddodd y toddydd: canys ni thynwyd y rhai drygionus ymaith. It was withdrawn within a few weeks ! It's amazing what a missing letter can do isn't it.What happened to the typesetter hardly bears thinking about. Probably hot at dawn. It's much sought after now by collectors all over the world ... it's known by experts as the "sprouts" Bible for obvious reasons and can fetch up to £18000 at auction, mainly because only 73 of them are know to exist. Now a much sillier one from a 1957 edition..you can probably guess what happened this time... it's from Job pennod 16 verse 14. Y mae yn fy rhwygo â rhwygiad ar rwygiad: y mae efe yn rhedeg arnaf fel cawr. Yep, sure enough, the typesetter missed out a vital letter .... Y mae yn fy rhwygo â rhwygiad ar rwygiad: y mae efe yn rhedeg arnaf fel car. Oh, the incongruity ! But again, it was withdrawn 8 months later ... maybe this shows you how long it takes to read that far into Y Beibl in more modern times ..... and now there are only a few hundred copies to be had, each worth around £800 or so, depending on condition. There is another "car" reference in the Bible though, it's that bit where Moses burned up the desert in his Triumph. I'm sure there's more of these to be found but meanwhile here's that Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog outfit again ( cowboy outfit?) ( couldn't resist that) including the excellent Branwen "Sbrings" Williams ...... If you want to see some more of these that I put on here ages ago, here's the link.... owl-husbands.html ..and talking of cars, ages ago in that "Welsh blog that mysteriously disappeared" of mine I did a thing about what would be a good name for a Welsh car. I might even do it again, as the Bishop said to the Actress. In America, the equivalent is "that's what she said" ... I feel I should admit that I made those two Bible misprints up ... there's a couple of others I've thought up using the same idea but I can't find where i've put them .....
Byddi di 'n angen cyfrifianell ..... fel hi .... Teipwch unrhyw rhif 3-digid ..... e.e 347 ( neu 738 neu 626 ... dim ots. ) Wedyn .... teipwch y rhif eto ..... 347347 neu 626626 ..... hawdd. ÷ 7 = ? ( i'r dim ) yna ÷ 11 = ? (i'r dim eto ) yna ÷ 13 = syndod ! Be digwydd ? Pam ? Triwch un arall ..... ac yn arall ..... Be digwydd ? Pam ? Synnwch di ffrindiau di, poenwch di elynion di. ... CADNO ... "Ludagretz" As you all know, I was reading ( and writing about) "Wild Wales" which has a great and blood-curdling section on "corpse candles" recently .... and it reminded me that ages ago I started to compile a little list of Welsh words you really really couldn't do without .... and cannwyll corff was one of them ..well, two of them actually. Yes, it's the Welsh expression for a corpse candle. How can you expect to get on in Wales without knowing that ? They make a good team with the equally essential toili = a phantom funeral. And they must make a fine trio with aderyn y drydan .... obviously, that's a storm bird which knocks on the window of those who are about to die. Well, back in the good old days with no TV, no flushing toilets, no hot water, a life expectancy of about 3 and windows the size of a postage stamp you had to get a bit of mystery and excitement into your humdrum existence. So I expect that most Welsh villages would be constantly awash with sea-birds banging on their windows, mysterious candles floating around along the mud-encrusted lanes and constant invites to phantom funerals. Another useful word on such occasions was, of course, peillged .... " a tribute of flour" ... no doubt these were forever flying back and forth whenever anyone had an attack of the scabs or were driven mad by infestations of 170000 fleas, or indeed a single "hôr" which was a swine-louse and always attached itself to particularly painful and embarrasing places. Or even worse, had their imminent and probably painful death predicted a few days earlier by a batallion of corpse candles and birds banging on the bloody windows. More of this shortly ... I am needed to get the coal-hole open, and that will probably require both a pegol and a pegwn and a good deal of pengaledwch as well. I will be back later with more useful words, plus music and, er, merriment. Many hours later .... all that's done .... more essential words then ... Well, there's loads and loads of Welsh words for describing the very odd inhabitants of the aforementioned village .... there's teirtroed ( three-footed) and rhefrog ( big-bottomed) for example, and of course the snappy crepa ( a crabbed dwarf, plural crepod ) and crymrudd ( stooping AND bloodstained) ... they would probably be busy yn creitennu ( gathering scurf) . And what about tenlli ? If you want some "linsey-woolsey", that's your word. Sorted. And of course there's plenty more .... you could fill a whole book with those nasty adjectives for odd-looking people. But it's time for music now, what with Wales being the Land of song and everything.... so here's Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog gan " Ceffylau ar D'rannau" and surely that female singer is the Nolwenn that sings with Twm Morus ?? No she isn't ..she's Branwen " Sbrings" Williams.
In the "i" this morning there's a big article about the Super Furry Animals highlighting their new tour in which they will play the Fuzzy Logic and Radiator songs... and both of those CDs are being re-released as well. All the information can be found at superfurry.com ... here's a direct link. www.superfurry.com/ ..and here's a rather duff list of venues and dates ...
As far a I can recall ( can't be bothered to go downstairs) the only Welsh song on either of them is Torra fy Ngwallt yn hir".. so hir it is .... ho ho .... Occam's Razor and a collection of Welsh apostrophes ( and Donald Trump's anti-Mexican wall)12/2/2016 I bet you've all noticed that Welsh writers are very fond of missing out great ch'nks of Welsh w'ds and stickin' an apo'trophe there inst'd. 'ke 'his. 't's a 'rible 'in in the 'rse 'tually. S'metimes they'll even m'ss 'hunks out the m'dle like I've j'st do'e. I've always thought that this is a bit like Trump's Mexican Wall..... "they" don't want anybody to actually read "their" language so they've thought up lots of ways of making it impenetrable to the outsider. All that cobblers about mutations making the language sound better , and the 437 ways of saying "yes" , and different ways of doing the preterite in every village , and the clever way they even shut out half of the actual Welsh speakers by filling the TV with " literary Welsh." ...you know the sort of thing. It explains a great deal about the Welsh language doesn't it, so using Occam's Razor we can be pretty sure that such a simple explanation is the true one. Anyway, you'll be wanting the next installment of my ongoing collection of these abominations ...so here we go .... for your amusement, entertainment and education ... these are all genuine, absolutely true and not made up examples .... and this is only a tiny selection.... thet things you've got to ask yourself is ... why the hell do they do this? PAM! PAM!! PAM!!! Surely the only possible reason is to keep us learners out ... MEXICAN WALL ! Occam's bloody razor in action .... f'amser Ch'rdydd 'rwsnos 'rar 'raeth 'ny 'eddi 'tho mae'ch 'mogel 'radeg o'th ha' That should keep you thinking for a bit ... that's if your head doesn't actually turn to a mixture of j'lly and 'hit. I'll tell you what, I might even write down the actual sentences they were in if I can get round to it ... OK .. here's a few of the more peculiar ones in context ... Diwrnod mawr yn yr ardal lle ces i fy magu oedd diwrnod Sioe Pontargothi ac roeddwn i'n bwrw 'mogel am gail bod yn y Sioe bob Mehefin. Sut y gallaf ddianc o'th afael ? Wel sneb lot yn gweud 'na 'eddi ... ... cyn 'rwsnos dwaetha oedd hi ... Canys nis oes un gaeaf nad yw'n ha' ( that's a bit of a giveaway) ... and now, Texas Radio Band and Rhan o ni .... |
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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