Eu Hiaith a Gadwant

The focus of this blog is a topic that I have been avoiding for several months as I felt it was necessary to allow myself time to cool off as it is a subject that is quite close to my heart.

 

I currently study at a University in Wales, a University which boasts a proud bilingual heritage and views equality as being of key importance.  It is also important to point out at this juncture that the University has a Welsh-English bilingual policy, so that both languages are respected equally.

 

 It was due to this, and also due to the importance of the Welsh language to my own personal identity, that I was appalled at claims made by a lecturer (of Science) that the Welsh language was a hindrance to learning, pointless and should be abandoned since, as a language, it was dead.

 

Now were I living in a cartoon world at the point that information was given unto me, my face would have turned red, steam would have screamed out of my nostrils and my head would have eventually exploded.  The actual claims made by the lecturer were wide-sweeping, and so I will attempt to lay them out, as I understand them, in order to comprehensively critique and reply to them as well as I can.

 

Her claims, as I understand them, are thus:

 

1. The Welsh language is dead.
2. The Welsh language is pointless.
3. Students who learned science through the medium of Welsh have trouble adapting to it in English at University level.
4. Speakers of Welsh have trouble spelling in English.

 

I will now debunk these as far as I am able to.

 

Claim One: The Welsh Language is Dead.

 

My problem with this assertion is that the classification ‘dead’ is a vague one, that is ill-defined.  When does a language become dead?  Is a language dead when there is no-one left who can understand it?  Is it when the native speakers of that language all die out?

 

One definition I found was that a dead language is “A language, such as Latin, that is no longer learned as a native language by a speech community". (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dead+language).  Even this is unable to successfully tested, as it would be impossible to discover whether or not a language was learned as a native language.  The same website defines ‘native language’ as “the language that a person has spoken from earliest childhood” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/native+language).  As I grew up bilingually learning both Welsh and English simultaneously, I would find it impossible to choose one or the other as a standalone ‘native language’.  I could define both languages in other ways, for instance I would select Welsh as the language of the geographical, social and historical context that I reside in, and yet I use English far more than I would use Welsh, mainly due to English’s status as an international lingua franca.  As Britain becomes increasingly more multicultural it is far safer to use English as the individuals I interact with on a daily basis range from Welsh to English, Chinese to Nigerian, Polish to Somali.  Should I use Welsh as a conversation starter in order to stubbornly stress a moribund point?  No, far more sensible to use English.  Does this make Welsh a dead language?  I would argue no, especially in terms of a dictionary definition.  It is estimated that there are 750,000+ speakers of Welsh (though this is from Wikipedia, and as such may not be hugely reliable), I think you would have to be slightly stubborn to insist that that number of speakers constitutes a language that is ‘dead’.  Notably, Welsh is one of a few small languages whose number of speakers grows every generation, usually when something is characterised by growth I tend not to describe it as ‘dead’, but I suppose I am not given to bouts of ethnic and cultural prejudice.

 

Claim Two: The Welsh Language is Pointless.

 

I will start this discussion by defining the term ‘pointless’.  In the same dictionary I used earlier it is defined as:

 

1. Lacking meaning; senseless.

2. Ineffectual: pointless attempts to rescue the victims of the raging fire.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pointless)

 

If you place these into the claim it becomes 1) The Welsh Language lacks meaning or 2) The Welsh Language is ineffectual.  All of these claims all work on the assumption that any given language is being used to achieve a goal, or that there is some underlying reasoning behind its use.

 

I feel that the assumptions upon which these value judgements are based do not apply in my own understanding of language.  Also I believe that if I were to look for meaning and effectiveness in the continued use of the Welsh language I could certainly find it.

 

In my personal experience of discussions on this topic, it is this perceived lack of ‘reason’ that troubles many people in regards to the Welsh language, especially individuals from a monolingual English background (the language not necessarily the country).  I believe that this is because any ‘foreign’ language that is taught in English-medium schools is taught with an eye for justification.  What I mean by this is that if monolingual English-speakers are taught French/German/Spanish (or whichever language) in schools, they are told that it would be profitable to have the skill of this new language (esp. in a financial/business sense).  Thus monolingual-English speakers relate bilingualism with practical aims and goals, which in my case is certainly not true.  My grasp of the Welsh language is a part of my cultural heritage, it is also a part of my identity, it is integral to who I am.  In this way I would argue that there is no need for a practical/financial ‘reason’ or ‘meaning’ for a language.  Even should this practical/financial line be pursued, it is incorrect, as I very recently got a job in no small part due to my ability to speak Welsh.

 

Generally the ‘point’ of a language is communication, and as long as there are people out there who can and do speak Welsh, it has a communicative ‘point’.  If it is insisted that this is not enough of a ‘point’ then I offer you this:

 

Mae unrhyw berson sy’n agor ei geg i twlu cachu ar yr iaith Gymraeg heb rheswm yn wirionyn, a dylai meddwl pa mor hurt yw ei eiriau cyn adael iddynt carlamu o’i geg.

 

Though that is a childish ‘reason’ for the Welsh language, it is merely satirising the equally childish and ignorant nature of the original claim.

 

Claim Three: Students who learned science through the medium of Welsh have trouble adapting to it in English at University level.

 

This is an interesting claim, as I have the least hands-on knowledge of this occurrence I am less certain of my rebuttal.  Though I am studying English Language at University, a number of my close, Welsh-speaking, friends are studying Science, and seem to be having little trouble succeeding.  No more trouble than monolinguals at any rate.

 

Though I no longer study the subject, I had studied it, through the medium of Welsh, until A-Level.  I studied triple science at GCSE level, and though they weren’t my strongest subjects did okay in them.  It interests me that this claim notes that studying science through Welsh hampers their understanding of the subject in English.  For the most part, scientific terminology in Welsh are largely borrowed from English, and English itself borrows heavily from other languages in terms of scientific terminology.  Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the huge changes that Welsh has imposed on science terminology.

 

English – Welsh

 

Biology – Bioleg

Physics – Ffiseg

Chemistry – Cemeg

Electronics - Electroneg

Alkali – Alcali

Acid – Asid

Atom – Atom

Atmosphere – Atmosffer

Battery – Bateri

Celsius – Celsiws

Capillary – Capilari

Decibel – Desibel

Electrolysis – Electrolysis

Energy – Egni

Mass – Mas

Molecule – Moliciwl

Momentum – Momentwm

Osmosis – Osmosis

Oxygen - Ocsigen

At this point I think I’ll stop as I feel I’ve expressed my point satisfactorily.  Of course this similarity isn’t universal, and there are some terms that aren’t so obviously linked.  Some examples of these are:

 

Buoyancy – Brigwth

Current - Llif

Bunsen Burner – Llosgydd Bunsen

Freezing Point – Pwynt Rhewi

Friction – Ffrithiant.

 

The difference between these terms is that they also exist outside of science, and so these terms are certainly in the minority, and as the science gets more complicated, the terminology get ever more similar.

 

At this point I must also note that there are students of all nationalities studying science at University, and I can’t help but note that no first language interference is suggested with any other nationalities.  Would the claim that a student's bilingualism is affecting their ability to study science be taken quite so passively if the first language of that student was Arabic?  Or French?  Or any other language at all?

 

“People who speak Arabic as their first language can’t do science in English.”  This claim wouldn’t be accepted quietly in the current social climate, especially with the amount of research there is to back up that claim, namely none at all.

 

The claim that a knowledge of Welsh interferes with ability to study science through English is one I refuse to accept, and only watertight evidence to suggest otherwise would convince me to reappraise my conclusion.

 

Claim Four:  Speakers of Welsh have trouble spelling in English.

 

When this was told to me I laughed until my head hurt.  The utter preposterousness of this claim gave me a migraine.  I offer you this anecdote.

 

A small child in a Welsh-medium school receives an English spelling test every week, on Friday.  At the beginning of the week the entire class are provided with a list of words they will be tested on, and sometimes a few wild cards are added, just for that little bit of extra excitement and jeopardy.  Week after week that child receives full marks in the spelling test (as he also does in a parallel Welsh test) because he is a fucking amazing spelling machine.

 

THAT CHILD WAS ME!

 

I challenge any hapless curmudgeon foolish enough to claim that my ability to speak Welsh affects spelling in English to a spelling competition.  I will spell you all over the walls, your rotting illiterate entrails will hang from the rafters of my linguistic cathedral, and you will bow down in obeisance to my superior spelling might.  The supernatural war-hammer of my spelling glory will splatter your idiocy all up on my altar.  My unholy spelling lightning-bolt-of-Zeus will incinerate your absurd preconceptions of the nature of spelling accuracy.

 

I think the general level of spelling accuracy in English, which in my experience is fairly poor, has reasons that lie outside of bilingualism, and the fact that many English-speaking monolinguals can’t spell for shit certainly backs up this claim.  It isn’t bi- or multilingualism that is to blame for poor spelling, I would suggest that it is the prevalence of ‘electronic language’, in particular txtspk.  Ba mebbz I dno wa I is tlkin bwt laik lol.

 

I suppose my conclusion, such as there is one, is thus:

 

Welsh isn’t ‘dead’, language doesn’t have to have a ‘point’, speaking Welsh doesn’t make you crap at science and speaking Welsh doesn’t inform how good you are at spelling in English.

 

It seems to me that there is an underlying dislike of the Welsh language, and perhaps the Welsh culture, in the individual who made these claims.  Perhaps when the individual was a child, the Welsh language invaded the farm where she lived and slaughtered her parents, and then perhaps the Welsh language held the individual captive and eventually sold her into academic slavery, and this resulted in the dislike that she feels for the Welsh language.

 

Whatever the reason, there certainly is a level of prejudice against the Welsh language that is fuelling her desire to pointlessly besmirch the language in the ignorant way she did.  What I really can’t understand is this:

 

If you dislike the Welsh language so much, why would you come to work in a University that has a very strong policy of bilingualism?

 

If you don’t like Welsh, why work in Wales?

Greeting Cards

A friend and I have taken it upon ourselves to concoct a number of counter-greetings cards for the reason of comedy.  I am not hugely assured of my ability to assemble these subversive pieces, and as such I have decided to workshop ideas directly into a blog.  This foreword is more a warning that an introduction, it is to tell you that I am merely pumping out as many ideas as I can in the hope that a small number of them will stick.  They might be good, they might not be, let’s find out.

 

I’ll start by attempting some subversive, subversive Christmas ones.

 

On the front of the card there is a depiction of a snowy town, smoke puffing from chimneys like in the oldy-olden days, snow piled high on the houses, the gardens and the road.  Inside the card there is photograph looking into a car through the windscreen.  The windscreen is smashed and a woman lies splayed in the driver’s seat, with her face drenched in blood and badly mangled.  There could possibly be two little tykes in the back similarly disfigured, depending on how wrong you really want to make the card.  The text at the very top of the page would read: “White Christmases cause 1,000,000 RTAs.  Don’t bitch about the gritters.”

 

An alternative would be a card depicting a family living room, bedecked with christmas tree, stockings, trimmings, half eaten pie and sipped sherry, and excited children gleefully sprinting towards base of the tree, which is stuffed with toys, while sickeningly twee parents watch on from the doorway.  Inside the card read: “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.  But we want presents, so screw the execrable oik.” (or maybe slightly stronger language, depending on the target audience).

 

A card depicting a green Santa shaking his fist and glaring out of the card.  The text inside reads: “I used to be green, before coca-cola got their filthy fucking mitts on my colour scheme.  Trust such an insidious corporation to engender themselves into the public consciousness in such a sinister manner.”

 

The front of another card depicts a near-naked Celt, with his hair spiking out madly, huge sickle in hand, ferocious grimace upon his face, charging at a turkey in order to tear it to pieces.  Text inside reads: “God isn’t real, Jesus isn’t a definite historical entity, christmas is a capitalist monster that eats away at your pocket.  But don’t worry because it’s all based on ancient pagan festivals anyway, so fuck it, go mad.” (I realise that Celts and Pagans may not wholly overlap, but I like the look of Celts so we’ll go with that.)

 

My final Christmas card has huge thick writing over the front.  It reads: “Important and Private for .  On the inside there is a picture of the child’s parents, and the text reads: “WE ARE SANTA”.

 

An idea for an anniversary card to a couple from a very religious background:  Picture depicts a family around a dinner table, all with sunken faces and dead eyes.  Text inside reads: Yes, your marriage has lasted a long time, religiously arranged marriages stereotypically do.  This is due to the repressive nature of your religious faith, and how it is reinforced in the wider religious community.  Does the length and endurance of your marriage make up for the fact that your soul has been destroyed due to the unfulfilling nature of your unhealthy relationship?  It is going to last forever and ever and ever and ever.  And ever”.

 

'Dear canvassing-religious-person, yes I have thought about god, at length in fact.  I have come to the conclusion that the idea of a god that is all-powerful and essentially good is a preposterous notion, given the inequality that is inherent in life on this planet.  There is no natural fairness, no natural justice, there is merely life, make of it what you can'.  Inside this particular card there would merely be the words ‘GROW UP’ printed in the very centre.

 

I am tempted to attempt a ‘sorry for your loss’ card to the relatives of a suicide bomber, although it would likely read ‘Congratulations’.  I won’t do that though.  Although I sort of just did.

 

Be my valentine, or else.

 

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

You don’t know me,

But I’m obsessed with you.

 

Your eyes are black,

Your eyes are blue,

The swelling around them,

Makes it hard for you to see,

That I love you.

 

I used to be a sailor,

So you’ll never untie those knots,

You just sit in my attic,

Peeing in my pots.

 

The roses are red,

Your face is a dull blue,

You sit there going off,

I’ll never go off you.

 

A card from a student to his/her parents.

 

“Yeah I passed, unfortunately due to the recession there are no jobs available and so I am going to have to sponge off’ve you until we escape this financial crisis.  Love you”.

 

Blasphemous, morbid, economic and ruinous to childhood, a bit of a hectic selection, I think that’s enough for a start.  I apologise if any offence was caused by any of my ideas.  If there was I guess my advice is: just pretend you didn’t read it.

The Church of Ceiling Cat

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

An Analysis of 'All the Single Ladies' by Beyonce

Once again I am driven by tedious pedantry to provide an analysis of another vacuous pop song for the sake of my own amusement.

 

I have chosen this song due to the aggravating nature of the lyrics, the singing, the music, the video, the dancing, the outfits and the general aura of the piece in its entirety.  It is also in part due to the insistence of the student union to play this video several times an hour, although maybe they only do this at 11-12 on a Monday morning as they have worked out my schedule and my distaste for this particular piece.

 

I will start by talking about the actual music, which seems to be generated by an elephant being repeatedly anally mutilated by a mini-moog, accompanied by a crowd of happy-clapping brain-dead pop fans who are more than happy to complement Beyonk with their continuous clap-based percussion.

Opening the song with the lyrics ‘All the single ladies’ and repeating this a mere seven times, I feel is a slightly week opening, as I feel the song would be stronger if this sentence was repeated significantly more, as it is straight repetition that I look for in a catchy pop song.  The repetition of this line has the sonic frequency of a panicked crow squawking incessantly, which of course fits in well with the poppy elephant-violating nature of the synth.

Of course this line is followed with the highly original and novel appeal to have all these ladies that Beyonce has gathered using her siren-call to ‘put their hands up’.  I doubt this is meant in a law-enforcing or threatening-with-weapon way, though that is certainly the message that the incessant music is portraying, I for one felt as though I was being held hostage aurally.

With the next line, Beyonce takes a bewilderingly fast turn into a narrative, in which she describes that she has recently ended a relationship, though no details are given at this point as to the length of the relationship, or indeed its seriousness.  She also takes time out to inform the listener that she is currently in a club, and ‘doing her own little thing’, though this admission is vague enough that this could be singing, dancing, drinking or even relieving herself in a toilet.  There is no way to know without having access to Beyonce in order to quiz her further on the matter.

Beyonce then continues to extrapolate on the reasoning behind her break-up, revealing that ‘You decided to dip but now you wanna trip’.  As a student of English I am distressed to admit that I have no fucking clue what this means.  Some of the possibilities that I tentatively suggest are that the ‘dipping’ is perhaps a rather crude reference to the sexual act, and in this case ‘trip’ would refer to the man, in my heteronormative assumption it is a man, journeying away from her.  In this instance I decipher the line as meaning ‘you decided to have sex with me but now you want to travel’.  On the other hand ‘dip’ could refer to dancing, but now that he is sick of dancing, the man would prefer to ‘trip’, though this seems increasingly unlikely.  Alternatively, the ‘dip’ could refer to the man’s desire to enjoy a sherbet dip, but now that he has he would rather enjoy some magic mushrooms in order to ‘trip’.  It could even suggest that the man wanted to go for a swim, but now that he is sick of swimming he would rather get dry.  In this example the work ‘trip’ has been misheard as ‘drip’.

The actual definition I am going to work with is one where ‘dip’ does indeed refer to dancing, and the ‘trip’ refers to getting mad, as in “You are tripping fool’.  This I have decided due to the next line being ‘cuz another brother noticed me’.  I am again using my powers of deduction in order to work out that the ‘brother’ in this sentence is not a blood relation.  Beyonce then admits that she is ‘up on him’ and that he is similarly ‘up on’ her.

The focus of this song then changes, for Beyonk has been talking directly to the ex for the duration of the song, and now she addresses the new fellow who is ‘up on’ her.  She assures the man that there is no need to pay any attention to the ex, for she has cried constantly for an entire three years, and as such feels that all emotional ties have been severed with her previous relationship, and that the ex has no reasonable right to be aggravated that she has chosen to be ‘up on’ a new fellow.

She continues then into the chorus, where she indicates that her ex should have provided her with jewellery, accompanied with a desire to eventually be joined in a form of matrimony with her.  The assumption behind this is that because he did not provide this shiny thing plus marriage he has no right to take umbrage at her behaviour, even is she is ‘up on’ ‘another brother’.

Luckily the line of ‘if you liked it you should have put a ring on it’ is only repeated six times at this point, which ensures that the listener doesn’t become jaded with this rather wearisome line.  Of course I am also assuming, possibly incorrectly, that the two ‘it’s in this line refer to different things, namely the first ‘it’ refers to Beyonk, and the second refers to her finger.  I could be wrong, although neither the idea that if he liked Beyonce he should have put a ring around her middle, or the idea that if he liked her finger then he should have provided the digit with a ring seem feasible.  Of course there is the off chance that Beyonce is in fact deriding the fact that the man was unable to throw a hoop around a pole in order to win her affection, though that is perhaps too odd a conclusion to draw.

The next verse is a description of her current state, where she notes that she has adequately moisturised her lips with lip gloss, and that she is wearing a man on her hips (odd choice of clothing, even for a pop diva).  She also notes that she has drink, I’m assuming alcohol, and that she is behaving like a fool, but that she doesn’t really give a toss what it is that ‘you’ think.  I am assuming in this line that the ‘you’ refers to her ex-character rather than me personally, as I feel my critique is valued highly in the mind of Beyonk.  She also notes that she has no need of permission due to the fact that a chance has been squandered, further emphasising that there is no jurisdiction over her actions.  This verse is ended with a quite bitter declaration that Beyonce is going to punish her ex, by forcing him to feel regret for his actions, which is perhaps slightly childish, and moreover it is the work of a bully.

The reminder that her finger needed to be clothed in tat is now repeated further, also followed by the obligatory ‘wo-oh-oh’ing.

The last verse is hypocritically opened, for though Beyonk has spent the previous two choruses declaring the need for jewellery, she is now announcing that she has no need to be treated to material goods, ‘I’m not that kind of girl’, and that she instead desires affection.  Furthermore, what she ‘deserves’, in her opinion, is a man that will ‘make’ her, ‘take’ her, and finally ‘deliver’ her to her destiny, ‘to infinity and beyond’.  At first glance it may seem that what Beyonce desires is Buzz Lightyear working as a postman, but more worrying is the continued objectification of women that is rampant in the song.  In the chorus she repeatedly objectifies herself with the term ‘it’, juxtaposing this with an ‘it’ which refers to her finger, which then conveys that Beyonce is only as important as her own finger.  The desire for a man to ‘make’, ‘take’ and ‘deliver’ her removes all agency from Beyonce, who is then stuck in a passive role, once again emphasising her as an object, rather than a person.

The verse is closed then with Beyonce imploring a man to give her a cwtch, ‘say I’m the one you own’, which of course begs the question do you own your partner?  I was of the opinion that we were living in the 21^st Century and had left such unhealthy notions behind.  Maybe not, and Beyonce stresses that, if this claim wasn’t made then ‘you’ will be left all alone, and that Beyonce, now fully objectified, will disappear like a gossamer apparition, or in her words ‘like a ghost’.

The song is brought to its moribund close with further repetition of ‘all the single ladies’ and ‘put a ring on it’.

I think that, objectification of women aside, my main gripe with this song is both the ugly dancing that the video contains, and the idiotic choice of giving Beyonce a metal robot hand in said video.  In purely logical terms, it would be impossible to put a ring on that finger, for you have yourself clothed it with some sort of robotic exoskeleton, which would restrict the placement of a ring, due to it’s un-circular nature.  Maybe it was the man’s desire to ‘put a ring on it’ but he was unable to due to Beyonce’s frankly impractical choice of accessorisation.  Though maybe his inability to work around her unique hand-garments is the true reason for their break-up.

In summary:

All the music-buying public x7

Put your hands up.

 

I don’t like it and I want you to put a sock in it x7

Woo oh ooh oh oh ooh oh oh ooh oh oh oh.

**Lyrics provided by www.elyricsworld.com**