I've always loved being confounded by unexpected stories like this. 20 years ago, I was working to build a self-publishing company - lulu.com - that would open up the world of book publishing. It was not an easy journey. In 2005 a book was published on the site that told the story of this welsh-patagonian exclave. It sold hundreds of copies in Wales and Argentina. In its narrow space, it was as much a 'bestseller' as anything in the NYTimes, and it was clear that it would never have been published or reached this audience any other way. It was a benediction on our labors.
"William Casnodyn Rhys, a young theology student, dreamed of establishing a Welsh colony where the Welsh language and culture could be preserved...."
Us Britons have managed to cause some remarkably odd outcomes, way beyond the usual Empire bollocks and this is an absolute belter.
Welsh is a Brythonic language, which is the most common class of languages spoken across what is now the UK(ish) that predates the Roman invasion in 55/54BC and 43 AD. It's way older than English. Other living examples include Scottish, Irish, Cornish (revived) and Bretton (off of France). There are, of course, dialects and so on.
I think it is absolutely delightful that a small part of Patagonia speaks Welsh. In a world hell bent on painting itself beige this is a lovely thing. Diversity is important in all walks of life.
> Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic form the Goidelic languages, while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are Brittonic. All of these are Insular Celtic languages,
Yeah though Brythonic and Goidelic both are considered to inherit from Insular Celtic. So it’s not completely off base.
My fiancé is Welsh but only speaks a few words. Despite many Welsh not speaking it now there’s more active Welsh speakers than Irish Gaelic speakers!
I spent some time in North Wales last summer where it’s still commonly spoken. It’s fascinating to hear Welsh. It’s not related to any Germanic or French or others so there’s little vocabulary shared with English aside from some loan words. Even the phonetics are quite strange sounding compared to other European languages.
> It’s fascinating to hear Welsh. It’s not related to any Germanic or French or others so there’s little vocabulary shared with English aside from some loan words.
Celtic is a branch of Indo-European, so the relationship exists. Naively, it's about as closely related to English (Germanic), and to French (Italic), as English is to French.
The closest cognate that comes to mind between English and Welsh is "apple", afal in Welsh.
If you believe the Italo-Celtic hypothesis, Welsh would be more closely related to French than English is.
Welsh enaid (soul) is cognate with Spanish alma (soul).
Welsh asyn is "cognate" with English ass (the animal), in the sense that Celtic and Germanic each separately borrowed the word from Latin asinus and the modern words are inherited independently. For this reason, the word is also "cognate" with French âne.
Welsh benyw (woman) is cognate with English queen (which used to mean "woman").
Welsh blodyn (flower) is cognate with English blossom. (And maybe also bloom.)
Welsh buwch (cow) is cognate with English cow.
(Although buwch really looks like it should be related to bovine, this does not appear to be the case. But we can see that the b- beginning the Welsh word here matches the b- beginning benyw, corresponding to kw- in English. This is also what happened in cow -- Celtic reduced gw- to b-. In this case, Germanic reduced gw- to k-; in queen, gw- became kw-.)
Welsh bol (stomach) is cognate with English belly.
And I haven't even gotten through the Bs. Cognates are fairly common. This wasn't even a list of Celtic words that are cognate with English words; it was a list of Celtic words that are cognate with other Celtic words.
For basic grammar sure, but English has what 30-40% of its vocabulary from French? There's also a lot of influence from Latin and Greek in English as well.
Likely it's just less cross-cultural sharing from Welsh into English. We get much more exposed to more tidbits from romance languages or German in English than we do Welsh or Gaelic.
Yeah correct, the French relationship with modern English is much closer because of (among other reasons) the Norman conquest that happened long after the Indo-European split and much closer to our time
> but English has what 30-40% of its vocabulary from French?
You have to be careful what you're counting when you quote figures like that. Here is your comment, but including only the words derived from French:
-----
... basic grammar sure, ............. influence ... Latin ...... just .... cultural .......... exposed† ..... Romance languages .................
† exposed is unlike "normal" French-derived words in English in that it is not derived from Old French; the equivalent from Old French is expound(ed), and even there I'm not sure why we have ex- instead of es-. I might credit exposed more to Latin than French.
-----
Here's English:
-----
for xxxx xxxx xxxx, but English has what 30 to 40 xxxx of its xxxx from French? There's also a lot of xxxx from xxxx and xxxx in English as well.
Likely it's xxxx less xxxx-xxxx sharing from Welsh into English. We xxxx much more xxxx to more tidbits from xxxx xxxx or xxxx in English than we do Welsh or xxxx.
xxxx! Something to read up on.
-----
53 / 71 words (including Welsh, but not Gaelic) are native English.
(Welsh ultimately derives from the name of a Celtic tribe known to us from Roman writers. In Germanic, the name became a generic word for foreigners. I think it's fair to call it English; it was already like that in proto-Germanic. Gaelic is more recent.)
10 / 71 words, including the somewhat questionable exposed, are from French.
5 are Latin, two are Norse, and then there's Gaelic. Greek is not represented except in the -ic ending on Gaelic (or basic).
If you're listening to someone speak English, knowing French is unlikely to be worth much.
Nice observation but it just illustrates what the GP is saying: the basic grammar is English while a huge proportion of the vocabulary comes from French. If you remove the grammatical words from the English selection you made, there's hardly anything left.
> If you're listening to someone speak English, knowing French is unlikely to be worth much.
It can help a lot when learning because of the huge vocabulary overlap, e.g. more or less every word ending with -tion, you just learn to pronounce it differently
I rated each word in the comment for how much I felt it represented grammar vs semantics (total adding to 1 for each word; ratings in increments of 0.1).
The ratings divided into 31.5 words worth of syntax and 37.5 words worth of semantics, adding up to 69 instead of 71 because I combined "a lot" and "as well" into one word each for this purpose.
French accounted for 6% of the grammar (reflecting my rating of sure and just as 90% "grammatical" each), and 22% of the semantics.
English got 91% of the grammar and 59% of the semantics. The point you might be most likely to disagree with is that I rated many prepositions as 50% semantic. (For example, to in the phrase thirty to forty got that rating, although to in get exposed to and something to read up on were rated 0% semantic.) The second point, cutting in the other direction, is that I rated all pronouns as 0% semantic; realistically they should rate a bit higher. In a better model, I'd probably like to rate them 100% grammatical and also ~30% semantic.
(The residual ~3% of grammar is the passive marker get, from Norse.)
If this is the kind of thing you enjoy, I'd be interested in your evaluation.
I'd say I'm quite sceptical about that kind of evaluative scheme because it seems to add a degree of subjectivity and arbitrariness about how things are rated.
At a first pass I'd just say that adjectives, nouns, and adverbs are "vocabulary", and everything else is grammar.
That won't work as a first pass. That gets you results like "there's also a lot of influence from French" being 2/3 semantics and 1/3 grammar†, with there holding just as much semantic content as influence does. It also disqualifies pronouns from counting as grammar at all, which is much more defensible than disqualifying semantically empty words, but not a common perspective.
I tend to take the perspective that if a foreign speaker is unlikely to have any trouble learning how to use a word correctly, that word is semantic, and otherwise, the word is grammatical.
† Assuming that the omission of verbs from your list of semantic words was a mistake. Otherwise you're up to 44% grammar. I did count "is" as being grammar, but I would certainly not extend that judgment to all verbs.
--- results ---
By your standard, English is 61% of the semantics and 91% of the grammar (if verbs have no semantics), or 62% of the semantics and 96% of the grammar (if verbs do have semantics).
French is 21% of the semantics and 6% of the grammar (if verbs have no semantics), or 20% of the semantics and 4% of the grammar (if verbs do have semantics).
I don't think much of your methodology, but it's worth noting that your overall numbers are almost identical to mine. (When verbs are meaningless; still very close but distinguishable otherwise.)
In reality, of course, many verbs such as sharing are rich in semantics, and many others such as do are more or less empty.
Oh, true, it was just a mistake to exclude verbs. Of course they should be vocabulary.
But I think of pronouns as grammatical, as well as the auxiliary particles in verb forms like "there is", "to go to", etc. So "have" and "is" can function grammatically when they're part of the verb form of another root verb, like "have been seen" and so on.
"Do" is obviously semantic when it's the main verb, e.g. "I'm doing my job" versus "I'm leaving my job". In the selection you quoted it's also playing a grammatical role which is just to point to the main verb form of the sentence, i.e. it could be replaced by repeating "get exposed to (titbits from)" without changing the meaning of the sentence.
So in "there is also a lot of influence from French", I would put "there _ also a _ of _ from _" as grammatical.
I'm sure my way is naive, but it's based I think on well-established categories. I'm not sure how linguists would distinguish grammatical words or even if they categorize based on words at all. e.g. "a lot of" as a quantifier might be completely grammatical, same as "more", "less", "thirty", etc.
> I think of pronouns as grammatical, as well as the auxiliary particles in verb forms like "there is", "to go to", etc.
There would not usually be considered a particle. It is a noun, but one that has no semantics whatever; it is there only to satisfy the grammatical rule requiring the verb in that clause to have a subject. (The term of art here is, straightforwardly enough, "dummy subject".)
You could ask questions about extraposition (as in "it's tragic that XXXXX", which is equivalent to "that XXXXX is tragic"); "there is [noun]" is obviously similar in some ways and less similar in other ways. One way in which it's gotten less similar over time is that the verb used to agree in number with [noun], but today it is more commonly always is, appearing to agree with there regardless of whether [noun] is singular or plural.
> "Do" is obviously semantic when it's the main verb, e.g. "I'm doing my job" versus "I'm leaving my job".
I don't think this is so obvious. Do (as a primary verb) is a verb in the same way that thing is a noun - it has all the same grammatical properties, and usually no semantic content. (Technically, since we have two meaningfully distinct classes of noun, we need more than one empty noun. The counterpart to thing is stuff. These do technically differ in their semantics, conveying the speaker's idea of how divisible the objects or materials in question are.)
In your example, I would say that doing is closely related to job and the semantics (still pretty weak) arise from the pairing. You can do many things by taking advantage of conventional fixed expressions. But if I were to remark to you that my friend was "doing a book", I suspect that you wouldn't know what that meant. Maybe my friend is an author. Maybe he's an illustrator. Maybe he's an editor. Maybe he's a press. Some words are vaguer than others; do is maximally vague.
> I'm sure my way is naive, but it's based I think on well-established categories.
Mostly, yes. Adverbs can be a bit hazier than nouns, verbs, and adjectives. You did yourself a big favor by defining a miscellaneous "other" category.
I will note that I excluded more (in more tidbits, but not in more exposed where it's an adverb) from the semantic category on the grounds that it is a determiner (same part of speech as the). This is something I think you might not have anticipated. I should also note that also is an adverb (adverbs are very broadly defined), so your methodology rated it as semantic. I think I rated it as 70% grammatical.
Prepositions are difficult to deal with. (This is generally true of almost every language.) For there is a lot of influence from French, my view is the following:
(1) From has fundamental semantics involving something being in a certain location and then moving out of that location;
(2) in this specific use, those semantics are close to the surface. A foreigner putting this phrase together would likely be able to guess that from was the right preposition to use.
Contrast something like refrain [from], where the semantics are still not entirely gone, but the foreigner is going to have a much harder time.
I didn't want to think very hard about exactly how much the semantics were present in prepositions, so if I thought they were present in a nontrivial way, I gave them 50%.
> "a lot of" as a quantifier might be completely grammatical, same as "more", "less", "thirty", etc.
I had a lot of trouble with thirty and ended up scoring it as an adjective for the unprincipled reason that that would make it count as semantic. Grammatically the least we can say is that it's not a normal adjective. This is also true of more and less (where we can say more), so good eye.
It's not quite the same thing as more and less, though. They can substitute for it:
A lot of the students...
More of the students...
But it can't substitute for them:
More students...
*A lot students...
This problem won't go away if we include the of; then we'd get
*More the students...
I think it's better not to include the of.
> I'm not sure how linguists would distinguish grammatical words or even if they categorize based on words at all.
Linguists use word to mean an atomic element. Exactly which parts of a certain stretch of speech are atomic depends on the analysis you're trying to do, and linguists have explicit terms for elements that are atomic at different levels or in different ways. By default a "word" would probably be taken to mean a lexeme, which is something that requires its own dictionary entry. A "morpheme" is something like "the smallest element to which we can assign independent significance" and might rarely be considered a "word". At this level you might observe that "fascinate" derives from Latin but its -ing ending, a separate morpheme, does not. A "phoneme" is a sound that is meaningfully distinct from other sounds, and would never be called a "word".
There is a concept of a "clitic", which is something that behaves like an independent word in some ways and like a dependent particle or inflection in other ways. This is almost always a lexeme that is pronounced as if it is part of a nearby word. I don't know of a term for "pronunciational atom", but I wouldn't be surprised if there is one.
Linguists make all kinds of observations about how certain words are semantically weak or in the process of losing their semantics ("semantic bleaching"). And of course they also make all kinds of observations about grammatical rules. So "how grammatical is this word" is definitely a question close to the heart of linguistics, but as you note the concepts are difficult to define and the question often cannot be answered rigorously as applied to particular words.
> Despite many Welsh not speaking it now there’s more active Welsh speakers than Irish Gaelic speakers!
I wanted to learn Welsh when I was living in Wales back in the 00s, but I couldn't find anywhere to take lessons that wasn't ridiculously expensive. I picked up bits and bobs over the years, but hardly anyone speaks it on a regular basis in the south, so I never got that much exposure.
If you like a challenge or know any half decent private torrent trackers, there are a number of dual welsh | english audio and subtitled tv series about:
"Death Valley" is a recent gentle comedic crime detective series on the BBC (iPlayer), set in Wales and the characters frequently break into Welsh (with English subtitles). It's lovely to hear!
...is not a term for any language. In Scotland, you might want to talk about Scots (a Germanic language) or Scots Gaelic (a Gaelic one).
Annoyingly, "Irish Gaelic" (the English phrase) uses the pronunciation /geɪlɪk/ (first syllable rhymes with "pale"), while "Scots Gaelic" uses /gælɪk/ (first syllable rhymes with "pal").
Scots is fascinating and the overlap with English is something those that live down south (England) don't really understand as it is more than an accent that is going on. Coupled with Scots there are accents, such as Glaswegian, which is very difficult for outsiders to understand. This is why Scottish people have their 'telephone voice' for when they need to communicate with English speakers that are not Scottish. 'Telephone voice' means speaking s-l-o-w-l-y and using words that are more widely understood, so 'wee' becomes 'little' or 'small'.
In the parts of Wales where Welsh is spoken, an English person isn't going to understand a word of it unless hearing a word is for something new, so 'helicopter' is still 'helicopter'. Everyone that speaks Welsh can speak English just fine, with a Welsh accent, but there won't be substitute words, so 'yes' is 'yes', whereas in Scots, that will be 'aye'.
As for Scots Gaelic, good point on the pronunciation. That language is on artificial life support, much like Welsh, where there has to be considerable government initiatives to keep it alive.
Danish to me sounds like northern English, especially Yorkshire, which historically makes a lot of sense. Yorkshire people pronounce the O in phone as Ø.
[Scotland] Scotland - it's quite a small country, there's not a large population, but we obviously we used to have Scots Gaelic, which was our national language but then, eh... something eh... [England pointedly looks in the other direction] another country came over and uh, kind of, uh...
I think, honestly, the percentage of people who speak Scots Gaelic is one percent. But now everyone speaks English...
[...]
[Wales] We... are probably one of the most patriotic bred people here. That's a bold claim. [video cuts] that we have to be very proud of our culture and our language because, uh, similar history with Scotland... so our language was on the edge of dying out, but, it sounds really different to English. Most people don't know that
[...]
[Ireland] Oh, yeah, so... Ireland is similar with Wales and Scotland with the... [gestures to England] our friend...
The Scotsman and the Irish girl speak only English, but the Welsh girl was raised speaking Welsh, so there does appear to be some comparative health.
My father grew up speaking Welsh at home. Years later, on a family holiday to Brittany, we heard some local old men speaking Breton. My dad was able to understand much of what they were saying. I had never realised the languages were that close.
What does it mean for one language to be older than another? They are both Indo-European languages, so they are descended from a common ancestor and have each been continually evolving since then.
Old English is generally considered to have arisen post Roman conquest of what we now call England. It is largely an amalgam (my term) of quite a lot of other languages extant at the time and then it took a life of its own.
Prior to the Roman invasion (55,54BC and 43AD) and subsequent conquests, the predominant languages here were Brythonic or Brittanic. I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s. The language has thankfully been revived somewhat and West Wales (Kernow) is rediscovering its roots. I also believe that shepherds across quite a lot of the modern UKoGB used to count their sheep in Cumbric numbers - the language of Cumbria (note how Cumbric looks suspiciously similar to Cwmru).
Discussions about Indo-European languages is paleontology for language! I'm not so good with me Greek to work out the correct term.
The notion of IE languages is analogous to fossils. We are talking about languages that are living, breathing and spoken. Obviously we must allow a bit of slack when ascribing certain attributes but I doubt any language scholar is going to get upset at Welsh being described as older than English.
The history of these islands has involved invasion after invasion after invasion. How on earth that history has resulted into only a few nationalistic identities and one empire is quite something. Bear in mind that sea travel is far quicker than land when you don't have roads so being islands means easy access and not hard access.
Old English descended from some other language (the name of which does not matter for the purpose of this comment).
Just because some accident caused the name "Brythonic" to be applied to languages older than the oldest language with the name "English" says nothing about the importance or value of Brythonic relative to English. The assigning of names to no-longer-spoken languages is arbitrary enough that you cannot use the names to prove anything about reality.
It means you were born before her, but that analogy doesn't work, as there is no event in the known history of English or Welsh that corresponds in an obvious way to "being born". It's more like saying that humans are (as a species) older than bonobos -- it's not even clear what that means let alone whether or not it's true.
There is no identifiable specific date at which people were speaking something recognizably "Welsh" or recognizably "English" (as opposed to proto-Indo-European). Both those languages have been evolving continuously, changing slightly every generation, from the point at which they were the same language thousands of years ago until today. Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes.
> Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes.
And yet you can talk about certain species being older than another can you not?
I'm not sure how to answer this because people do it all the time. Dogs as a species are around 15-20,000 years old for example, while cows only branched off from aurochs around 10,000 years ago. Both species have common ancestory but they are distinct and we can trace their paths back and give approximate dates to the individual branches, exactly as we do for languages.
Yeah, unless a modern Welsh speaker could go back in time to 1 AD and talk to native Britons, it doesn't make any sense. You may as well say that Italian is older than English because the Romans spoke Latin.
If we all spoke the same language - say French (lingua Franca) - then we might all think the same way too and the (human) world would soon become beige. I'm not knocking French but English is often known as a lingua franca - a description of English, in Latin about the language of the Franks - or as we now describe it: French!
I think diversity is always indicated as a positive force in all walks of life. It might not be the easiest path. I might have some issues with monotheism vs polytheism or even theism entirely as a counter arguement 8)
Christianity has a Biblically documented myth about a Tower of Babel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel. Well, that bit of Genesis has a slightly different axe to grind to mine.
Language extends and limits thought. Languages can have remarkable differences in their expressiveness and that enriches the minds of those who speak them. It's not wonder that being a polyglot has supposed cognitive benefits.
There are some who hold those beliefs, but they give only extremely weak arguments. It's hard to imagine that the benefits of learning and thinking in one language rather than another outweigh the benefits of learning a language like English that gives a person access to a vast literature and vast economic and social opportunities.
I am not distressed by the thought of an adult's deciding to learn Welsh as a hobby just as I'm not distressed by an adult's spending time on any hobby, but it is painful for me to image a child's being taught an obscure language like Welsh out of some almost-certainly-false belief that it will give him or her access to powerful modes of thought that are unavailable to speakers of other languages. It strikes me as almost mistreating the child to restrict his intellectual, social and economic opportunities in this way (unless the child can pick up second and third languages easily, which is not most children).
I'm not saying that I understand how a language interacts with a developing child's brain well enough to say with confidence that Welsh cannot grant anyone the ability to think in ways that are not possible in other languages. I am open to having my mind changed. But nothing I've ever read over many conversations even begins to change my mind. It's all very simplistic argumentation, e.g., "Society teaches us that diversity is good; so clearly linguistic diversity must be good", e.g., "<<Sapir-Whorf hypothesis>> sure is an impressive term probably coined by super-smart professors, so it is probably true".
What a nice surprise to find this on HN! I live in Puerto Madryn, the city celebrates its anniversary in honor of the arrival of the first Welsh settlers. Around Chubut, it’s pretty common to see road and tourist signage in Spanish, Welsh, Aoniken and English — especially along Provincial Route 25, which connects the coast to the mountains in the west. It more or less follows the path the welsh took from the Chubut river valley to Esquel and Trevelin.
Native Welsh speaker here! It has always been a dream of mine to go to Y Wladfa, and share a bond through language with people there.
One fun fact - my dad took some higher-learning Welsh exam as an adult. They had to time the exam to match Patagonia, as they were given the exact same exam to avoid any cheating.
If anyone is interested Gruf Rhys (from Super Furry Animals) made a film, Separado!, where he tried to track down his Welsh family that migrated to Patagonia.
I love the Patagonian Welsh. BBC Wales, which often has great comedy, has a sitcom based around the original emigration to Patagonia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060cd20
The whole thing feels very much like a Star Trek plot to me with a culture leaving on a ship to an unknown world to preserve their way of life - which later the crew would happen upon in some episode.
I've always loved being confounded by unexpected stories like this. 20 years ago, I was working to build a self-publishing company - lulu.com - that would open up the world of book publishing. It was not an easy journey. In 2005 a book was published on the site that told the story of this welsh-patagonian exclave. It sold hundreds of copies in Wales and Argentina. In its narrow space, it was as much a 'bestseller' as anything in the NYTimes, and it was clear that it would never have been published or reached this audience any other way. It was a benediction on our labors.
"William Casnodyn Rhys, a young theology student, dreamed of establishing a Welsh colony where the Welsh language and culture could be preserved...."
https://www.lulu.com/shop/william-casnodyn-rhys/a-welsh-song...
Us Britons have managed to cause some remarkably odd outcomes, way beyond the usual Empire bollocks and this is an absolute belter.
Welsh is a Brythonic language, which is the most common class of languages spoken across what is now the UK(ish) that predates the Roman invasion in 55/54BC and 43 AD. It's way older than English. Other living examples include Scottish, Irish, Cornish (revived) and Bretton (off of France). There are, of course, dialects and so on.
I think it is absolutely delightful that a small part of Patagonia speaks Welsh. In a world hell bent on painting itself beige this is a lovely thing. Diversity is important in all walks of life.
FWIW, Scottish and Irish (and their sister Manx) are not Brythonic, they are in the other branch of extant Celtic languages, Goidelic/Gaelic.
> Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic form the Goidelic languages, while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are Brittonic. All of these are Insular Celtic languages,
Yeah though Brythonic and Goidelic both are considered to inherit from Insular Celtic. So it’s not completely off base.
My fiancé is Welsh but only speaks a few words. Despite many Welsh not speaking it now there’s more active Welsh speakers than Irish Gaelic speakers!
I spent some time in North Wales last summer where it’s still commonly spoken. It’s fascinating to hear Welsh. It’s not related to any Germanic or French or others so there’s little vocabulary shared with English aside from some loan words. Even the phonetics are quite strange sounding compared to other European languages.
https://www.translationdirectory.com/articles/article2577.ph...
> It’s fascinating to hear Welsh. It’s not related to any Germanic or French or others so there’s little vocabulary shared with English aside from some loan words.
Celtic is a branch of Indo-European, so the relationship exists. Naively, it's about as closely related to English (Germanic), and to French (Italic), as English is to French.
The closest cognate that comes to mind between English and Welsh is "apple", afal in Welsh.
If you believe the Italo-Celtic hypothesis, Welsh would be more closely related to French than English is.
Browsing https://www.omniglot.com/language/celtic/connections/index.p... shows some other cognates:
Welsh enaid (soul) is cognate with Spanish alma (soul).
Welsh asyn is "cognate" with English ass (the animal), in the sense that Celtic and Germanic each separately borrowed the word from Latin asinus and the modern words are inherited independently. For this reason, the word is also "cognate" with French âne.
Welsh benyw (woman) is cognate with English queen (which used to mean "woman").
Welsh blodyn (flower) is cognate with English blossom. (And maybe also bloom.)
Welsh buwch (cow) is cognate with English cow.
(Although buwch really looks like it should be related to bovine, this does not appear to be the case. But we can see that the b- beginning the Welsh word here matches the b- beginning benyw, corresponding to kw- in English. This is also what happened in cow -- Celtic reduced gw- to b-. In this case, Germanic reduced gw- to k-; in queen, gw- became kw-.)
Welsh bol (stomach) is cognate with English belly.
And I haven't even gotten through the Bs. Cognates are fairly common. This wasn't even a list of Celtic words that are cognate with English words; it was a list of Celtic words that are cognate with other Celtic words.
> Welsh benyw (woman) is cognate with English queen (which used to mean "woman").
The relationships between languages are fun and fascinating. "kvinna" still means woman in Swedish.
> "kvinna" still means woman in Swedish.
We started updating that more than a thousand years ago. Get with the times already. ;D
I wonder if that’s where the use of “quine” for “girl” comes from in North East Scotland?
Yes.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quine#Scots
(That is to say, the Scots word descends from English, not from Norse.)
> as English is to French.
For basic grammar sure, but English has what 30-40% of its vocabulary from French? There's also a lot of influence from Latin and Greek in English as well.
Likely it's just less cross-cultural sharing from Welsh into English. We get much more exposed to more tidbits from romance languages or German in English than we do Welsh or Gaelic.
> Italo-Celtoc hypothesis
Fascinating! Something to read up on.
Yeah correct, the French relationship with modern English is much closer because of (among other reasons) the Norman conquest that happened long after the Indo-European split and much closer to our time
> but English has what 30-40% of its vocabulary from French?
You have to be careful what you're counting when you quote figures like that. Here is your comment, but including only the words derived from French:
-----
... basic grammar sure, ............. influence ... Latin ...... just .... cultural .......... exposed† ..... Romance languages .................
† exposed is unlike "normal" French-derived words in English in that it is not derived from Old French; the equivalent from Old French is expound(ed), and even there I'm not sure why we have ex- instead of es-. I might credit exposed more to Latin than French.
-----
Here's English:
-----
for xxxx xxxx xxxx, but English has what 30 to 40 xxxx of its xxxx from French? There's also a lot of xxxx from xxxx and xxxx in English as well.
Likely it's xxxx less xxxx-xxxx sharing from Welsh into English. We xxxx much more xxxx to more tidbits from xxxx xxxx or xxxx in English than we do Welsh or xxxx.
xxxx! Something to read up on.
-----
53 / 71 words (including Welsh, but not Gaelic) are native English.
(Welsh ultimately derives from the name of a Celtic tribe known to us from Roman writers. In Germanic, the name became a generic word for foreigners. I think it's fair to call it English; it was already like that in proto-Germanic. Gaelic is more recent.)
10 / 71 words, including the somewhat questionable exposed, are from French.
5 are Latin, two are Norse, and then there's Gaelic. Greek is not represented except in the -ic ending on Gaelic (or basic).
If you're listening to someone speak English, knowing French is unlikely to be worth much.
Nice observation but it just illustrates what the GP is saying: the basic grammar is English while a huge proportion of the vocabulary comes from French. If you remove the grammatical words from the English selection you made, there's hardly anything left.
> If you're listening to someone speak English, knowing French is unlikely to be worth much.
It can help a lot when learning because of the huge vocabulary overlap, e.g. more or less every word ending with -tion, you just learn to pronounce it differently
I thought this was an interesting idea.
I rated each word in the comment for how much I felt it represented grammar vs semantics (total adding to 1 for each word; ratings in increments of 0.1).
The ratings divided into 31.5 words worth of syntax and 37.5 words worth of semantics, adding up to 69 instead of 71 because I combined "a lot" and "as well" into one word each for this purpose.
French accounted for 6% of the grammar (reflecting my rating of sure and just as 90% "grammatical" each), and 22% of the semantics.
English got 91% of the grammar and 59% of the semantics. The point you might be most likely to disagree with is that I rated many prepositions as 50% semantic. (For example, to in the phrase thirty to forty got that rating, although to in get exposed to and something to read up on were rated 0% semantic.) The second point, cutting in the other direction, is that I rated all pronouns as 0% semantic; realistically they should rate a bit higher. In a better model, I'd probably like to rate them 100% grammatical and also ~30% semantic.
(The residual ~3% of grammar is the passive marker get, from Norse.)
If this is the kind of thing you enjoy, I'd be interested in your evaluation.
I'd say I'm quite sceptical about that kind of evaluative scheme because it seems to add a degree of subjectivity and arbitrariness about how things are rated.
At a first pass I'd just say that adjectives, nouns, and adverbs are "vocabulary", and everything else is grammar.
That won't work as a first pass. That gets you results like "there's also a lot of influence from French" being 2/3 semantics and 1/3 grammar†, with there holding just as much semantic content as influence does. It also disqualifies pronouns from counting as grammar at all, which is much more defensible than disqualifying semantically empty words, but not a common perspective.
I tend to take the perspective that if a foreign speaker is unlikely to have any trouble learning how to use a word correctly, that word is semantic, and otherwise, the word is grammatical.
† Assuming that the omission of verbs from your list of semantic words was a mistake. Otherwise you're up to 44% grammar. I did count "is" as being grammar, but I would certainly not extend that judgment to all verbs.
--- results ---
By your standard, English is 61% of the semantics and 91% of the grammar (if verbs have no semantics), or 62% of the semantics and 96% of the grammar (if verbs do have semantics).
French is 21% of the semantics and 6% of the grammar (if verbs have no semantics), or 20% of the semantics and 4% of the grammar (if verbs do have semantics).
I don't think much of your methodology, but it's worth noting that your overall numbers are almost identical to mine. (When verbs are meaningless; still very close but distinguishable otherwise.)
In reality, of course, many verbs such as sharing are rich in semantics, and many others such as do are more or less empty.
Oh, true, it was just a mistake to exclude verbs. Of course they should be vocabulary.
But I think of pronouns as grammatical, as well as the auxiliary particles in verb forms like "there is", "to go to", etc. So "have" and "is" can function grammatically when they're part of the verb form of another root verb, like "have been seen" and so on.
"Do" is obviously semantic when it's the main verb, e.g. "I'm doing my job" versus "I'm leaving my job". In the selection you quoted it's also playing a grammatical role which is just to point to the main verb form of the sentence, i.e. it could be replaced by repeating "get exposed to (titbits from)" without changing the meaning of the sentence.
So in "there is also a lot of influence from French", I would put "there _ also a _ of _ from _" as grammatical.
I'm sure my way is naive, but it's based I think on well-established categories. I'm not sure how linguists would distinguish grammatical words or even if they categorize based on words at all. e.g. "a lot of" as a quantifier might be completely grammatical, same as "more", "less", "thirty", etc.
> I think of pronouns as grammatical, as well as the auxiliary particles in verb forms like "there is", "to go to", etc.
There would not usually be considered a particle. It is a noun, but one that has no semantics whatever; it is there only to satisfy the grammatical rule requiring the verb in that clause to have a subject. (The term of art here is, straightforwardly enough, "dummy subject".)
You could ask questions about extraposition (as in "it's tragic that XXXXX", which is equivalent to "that XXXXX is tragic"); "there is [noun]" is obviously similar in some ways and less similar in other ways. One way in which it's gotten less similar over time is that the verb used to agree in number with [noun], but today it is more commonly always is, appearing to agree with there regardless of whether [noun] is singular or plural.
> "Do" is obviously semantic when it's the main verb, e.g. "I'm doing my job" versus "I'm leaving my job".
I don't think this is so obvious. Do (as a primary verb) is a verb in the same way that thing is a noun - it has all the same grammatical properties, and usually no semantic content. (Technically, since we have two meaningfully distinct classes of noun, we need more than one empty noun. The counterpart to thing is stuff. These do technically differ in their semantics, conveying the speaker's idea of how divisible the objects or materials in question are.)
In your example, I would say that doing is closely related to job and the semantics (still pretty weak) arise from the pairing. You can do many things by taking advantage of conventional fixed expressions. But if I were to remark to you that my friend was "doing a book", I suspect that you wouldn't know what that meant. Maybe my friend is an author. Maybe he's an illustrator. Maybe he's an editor. Maybe he's a press. Some words are vaguer than others; do is maximally vague.
> I'm sure my way is naive, but it's based I think on well-established categories.
Mostly, yes. Adverbs can be a bit hazier than nouns, verbs, and adjectives. You did yourself a big favor by defining a miscellaneous "other" category.
I will note that I excluded more (in more tidbits, but not in more exposed where it's an adverb) from the semantic category on the grounds that it is a determiner (same part of speech as the). This is something I think you might not have anticipated. I should also note that also is an adverb (adverbs are very broadly defined), so your methodology rated it as semantic. I think I rated it as 70% grammatical.
Prepositions are difficult to deal with. (This is generally true of almost every language.) For there is a lot of influence from French, my view is the following:
(1) From has fundamental semantics involving something being in a certain location and then moving out of that location;
(2) in this specific use, those semantics are close to the surface. A foreigner putting this phrase together would likely be able to guess that from was the right preposition to use.
Contrast something like refrain [from], where the semantics are still not entirely gone, but the foreigner is going to have a much harder time.
I didn't want to think very hard about exactly how much the semantics were present in prepositions, so if I thought they were present in a nontrivial way, I gave them 50%.
> "a lot of" as a quantifier might be completely grammatical, same as "more", "less", "thirty", etc.
I had a lot of trouble with thirty and ended up scoring it as an adjective for the unprincipled reason that that would make it count as semantic. Grammatically the least we can say is that it's not a normal adjective. This is also true of more and less (where we can say more), so good eye.
"A lot [of]" is heavily grammaticalized and this process appears to be continuing. Here's a blog post observing that native speakers often think of "a lot" as a single word: https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-bette...
It's not quite the same thing as more and less, though. They can substitute for it:
A lot of the students...
More of the students...
But it can't substitute for them:
More students...
*A lot students...
This problem won't go away if we include the of; then we'd get
*More the students...
I think it's better not to include the of.
> I'm not sure how linguists would distinguish grammatical words or even if they categorize based on words at all.
Linguists use word to mean an atomic element. Exactly which parts of a certain stretch of speech are atomic depends on the analysis you're trying to do, and linguists have explicit terms for elements that are atomic at different levels or in different ways. By default a "word" would probably be taken to mean a lexeme, which is something that requires its own dictionary entry. A "morpheme" is something like "the smallest element to which we can assign independent significance" and might rarely be considered a "word". At this level you might observe that "fascinate" derives from Latin but its -ing ending, a separate morpheme, does not. A "phoneme" is a sound that is meaningfully distinct from other sounds, and would never be called a "word".
There is a concept of a "clitic", which is something that behaves like an independent word in some ways and like a dependent particle or inflection in other ways. This is almost always a lexeme that is pronounced as if it is part of a nearby word. I don't know of a term for "pronunciational atom", but I wouldn't be surprised if there is one.
Linguists make all kinds of observations about how certain words are semantically weak or in the process of losing their semantics ("semantic bleaching"). And of course they also make all kinds of observations about grammatical rules. So "how grammatical is this word" is definitely a question close to the heart of linguistics, but as you note the concepts are difficult to define and the question often cannot be answered rigorously as applied to particular words.
P.S. Next time I'll have to listen for b- words in Welsh to see if I can pick them out.
> Despite many Welsh not speaking it now there’s more active Welsh speakers than Irish Gaelic speakers!
I wanted to learn Welsh when I was living in Wales back in the 00s, but I couldn't find anywhere to take lessons that wasn't ridiculously expensive. I picked up bits and bobs over the years, but hardly anyone speaks it on a regular basis in the south, so I never got that much exposure.
If you like a challenge or know any half decent private torrent trackers, there are a number of dual welsh | english audio and subtitled tv series about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Welsh_television_progr...
"Death Valley" is a recent gentle comedic crime detective series on the BBC (iPlayer), set in Wales and the characters frequently break into Welsh (with English subtitles). It's lovely to hear!
> Scottish
...is not a term for any language. In Scotland, you might want to talk about Scots (a Germanic language) or Scots Gaelic (a Gaelic one).
Annoyingly, "Irish Gaelic" (the English phrase) uses the pronunciation /geɪlɪk/ (first syllable rhymes with "pale"), while "Scots Gaelic" uses /gælɪk/ (first syllable rhymes with "pal").
Scots is fascinating and the overlap with English is something those that live down south (England) don't really understand as it is more than an accent that is going on. Coupled with Scots there are accents, such as Glaswegian, which is very difficult for outsiders to understand. This is why Scottish people have their 'telephone voice' for when they need to communicate with English speakers that are not Scottish. 'Telephone voice' means speaking s-l-o-w-l-y and using words that are more widely understood, so 'wee' becomes 'little' or 'small'.
In the parts of Wales where Welsh is spoken, an English person isn't going to understand a word of it unless hearing a word is for something new, so 'helicopter' is still 'helicopter'. Everyone that speaks Welsh can speak English just fine, with a Welsh accent, but there won't be substitute words, so 'yes' is 'yes', whereas in Scots, that will be 'aye'.
As for Scots Gaelic, good point on the pronunciation. That language is on artificial life support, much like Welsh, where there has to be considerable government initiatives to keep it alive.
I have found some regional Scots to sound eerily like some variant of Danish.
Danish to me sounds like northern English, especially Yorkshire, which historically makes a lot of sense. Yorkshire people pronounce the O in phone as Ø.
I really like the grammar,which is from Gaelic - it probably explains constructions like "did you not?".
> That language is on artificial life support, much like Welsh, where there has to be considerable government initiatives to keep it alive.
I am endlessly amused by the introductions in this video, describing the significance of English in each guest's home country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dQiA8lz45c#t=378
[Scotland] Scotland - it's quite a small country, there's not a large population, but we obviously we used to have Scots Gaelic, which was our national language but then, eh... something eh... [England pointedly looks in the other direction] another country came over and uh, kind of, uh...
I think, honestly, the percentage of people who speak Scots Gaelic is one percent. But now everyone speaks English...
[...]
[Wales] We... are probably one of the most patriotic bred people here. That's a bold claim. [video cuts] that we have to be very proud of our culture and our language because, uh, similar history with Scotland... so our language was on the edge of dying out, but, it sounds really different to English. Most people don't know that
[...]
[Ireland] Oh, yeah, so... Ireland is similar with Wales and Scotland with the... [gestures to England] our friend...
The Scotsman and the Irish girl speak only English, but the Welsh girl was raised speaking Welsh, so there does appear to be some comparative health.
My father grew up speaking Welsh at home. Years later, on a family holiday to Brittany, we heard some local old men speaking Breton. My dad was able to understand much of what they were saying. I had never realised the languages were that close.
> It's way older than English
What does it mean for one language to be older than another? They are both Indo-European languages, so they are descended from a common ancestor and have each been continually evolving since then.
Old English is generally considered to have arisen post Roman conquest of what we now call England. It is largely an amalgam (my term) of quite a lot of other languages extant at the time and then it took a life of its own.
Prior to the Roman invasion (55,54BC and 43AD) and subsequent conquests, the predominant languages here were Brythonic or Brittanic. I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s. The language has thankfully been revived somewhat and West Wales (Kernow) is rediscovering its roots. I also believe that shepherds across quite a lot of the modern UKoGB used to count their sheep in Cumbric numbers - the language of Cumbria (note how Cumbric looks suspiciously similar to Cwmru).
Discussions about Indo-European languages is paleontology for language! I'm not so good with me Greek to work out the correct term.
The notion of IE languages is analogous to fossils. We are talking about languages that are living, breathing and spoken. Obviously we must allow a bit of slack when ascribing certain attributes but I doubt any language scholar is going to get upset at Welsh being described as older than English.
The history of these islands has involved invasion after invasion after invasion. How on earth that history has resulted into only a few nationalistic identities and one empire is quite something. Bear in mind that sea travel is far quicker than land when you don't have roads so being islands means easy access and not hard access.
>I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s.
Allegedly her last words were "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don’t want to speak English!").
Old English descended from some other language (the name of which does not matter for the purpose of this comment).
Just because some accident caused the name "Brythonic" to be applied to languages older than the oldest language with the name "English" says nothing about the importance or value of Brythonic relative to English. The assigning of names to no-longer-spoken languages is arbitrary enough that you cannot use the names to prove anything about reality.
What does it mean for me to be older than my sister, when we have exactly the same ancestry?
It means you were born before her, but that analogy doesn't work, as there is no event in the known history of English or Welsh that corresponds in an obvious way to "being born". It's more like saying that humans are (as a species) older than bonobos -- it's not even clear what that means let alone whether or not it's true.
There is no identifiable specific date at which people were speaking something recognizably "Welsh" or recognizably "English" (as opposed to proto-Indo-European). Both those languages have been evolving continuously, changing slightly every generation, from the point at which they were the same language thousands of years ago until today. Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes.
> Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes.
And yet you can talk about certain species being older than another can you not?
No, I don't think you can. What would it mean?
I'm not sure how to answer this because people do it all the time. Dogs as a species are around 15-20,000 years old for example, while cows only branched off from aurochs around 10,000 years ago. Both species have common ancestory but they are distinct and we can trace their paths back and give approximate dates to the individual branches, exactly as we do for languages.
Yeah, unless a modern Welsh speaker could go back in time to 1 AD and talk to native Britons, it doesn't make any sense. You may as well say that Italian is older than English because the Romans spoke Latin.
How is diversity of languages important or even good? Language only works when it's not diverse so people can understand each other.
If we all spoke the same language - say French (lingua Franca) - then we might all think the same way too and the (human) world would soon become beige. I'm not knocking French but English is often known as a lingua franca - a description of English, in Latin about the language of the Franks - or as we now describe it: French!
I think diversity is always indicated as a positive force in all walks of life. It might not be the easiest path. I might have some issues with monotheism vs polytheism or even theism entirely as a counter arguement 8)
Christianity has a Biblically documented myth about a Tower of Babel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel. Well, that bit of Genesis has a slightly different axe to grind to mine.
Language extends and limits thought. Languages can have remarkable differences in their expressiveness and that enriches the minds of those who speak them. It's not wonder that being a polyglot has supposed cognitive benefits.
There are some who hold those beliefs, but they give only extremely weak arguments. It's hard to imagine that the benefits of learning and thinking in one language rather than another outweigh the benefits of learning a language like English that gives a person access to a vast literature and vast economic and social opportunities.
I am not distressed by the thought of an adult's deciding to learn Welsh as a hobby just as I'm not distressed by an adult's spending time on any hobby, but it is painful for me to image a child's being taught an obscure language like Welsh out of some almost-certainly-false belief that it will give him or her access to powerful modes of thought that are unavailable to speakers of other languages. It strikes me as almost mistreating the child to restrict his intellectual, social and economic opportunities in this way (unless the child can pick up second and third languages easily, which is not most children).
I'm not saying that I understand how a language interacts with a developing child's brain well enough to say with confidence that Welsh cannot grant anyone the ability to think in ways that are not possible in other languages. I am open to having my mind changed. But nothing I've ever read over many conversations even begins to change my mind. It's all very simplistic argumentation, e.g., "Society teaches us that diversity is good; so clearly linguistic diversity must be good", e.g., "<<Sapir-Whorf hypothesis>> sure is an impressive term probably coined by super-smart professors, so it is probably true".
Are you a polyglot or is this sheer speculation?
Cymraeg dates to many years after the Roman occupation.
English was only established as the British language by Henry VII, so preceding it isn't hard.
What a nice surprise to find this on HN! I live in Puerto Madryn, the city celebrates its anniversary in honor of the arrival of the first Welsh settlers. Around Chubut, it’s pretty common to see road and tourist signage in Spanish, Welsh, Aoniken and English — especially along Provincial Route 25, which connects the coast to the mountains in the west. It more or less follows the path the welsh took from the Chubut river valley to Esquel and Trevelin.
Native Welsh speaker here! It has always been a dream of mine to go to Y Wladfa, and share a bond through language with people there.
One fun fact - my dad took some higher-learning Welsh exam as an adult. They had to time the exam to match Patagonia, as they were given the exact same exam to avoid any cheating.
If anyone is interested Gruf Rhys (from Super Furry Animals) made a film, Separado!, where he tried to track down his Welsh family that migrated to Patagonia.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1505405/
I love the Patagonian Welsh. BBC Wales, which often has great comedy, has a sitcom based around the original emigration to Patagonia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060cd20
The whole thing feels very much like a Star Trek plot to me with a culture leaving on a ship to an unknown world to preserve their way of life - which later the crew would happen upon in some episode.
There's a lovely episode of _Welcome to Wrexham_ where they fly some fans over from Patagonia to see their football team play.
Not mentioned in the article but you can drink good beer there. Probably this one: https://www.instagram.com/draigcerveza
I see someone else here also listens to Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff...
Hello fellow listener, what games do you play? I'm currently running a play-by-post of Urban Shadows.
Why does this entry not show up on https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org ?
Edit: I guess it’s because of the mobile URL…?
it does, but on the second page, because it was originally posted 3 days ago.
oh derp, so it does. thanks!
[flagged]
What an incredibly weird comment.
How is it weird? I just described my observations.
> In average, better looking than non-welsh average.
> unlike the mapuche tribe people, who have produced the local criminal and ugly population
Your observations are horribly racist.
He lives in Argentina, so I'm guessing he is not risking ostracism for the comment like he would be if he lived in the US or Britain.
"oid mortales el grito sagrado: libertad, libertad, libertad"
I only care about facts
I'm not sure what you're subjective observations have to do with facts, but ok?
you are not properly appreciating my first-hand account on the matter
I don't think anyone appreciates anything from anyone who spends hours "daygaming" like a 40 year old virgin