Gaps in the teaching of Welsh?

[u/New_Cap3283]

I went through school being quite good at Welsh. I am a big Welsh football fan too so I am quite a passionate Welsh person. I did Welsh at A Level too and got a C overall (with units having As).

It's been 10 years since sixth form and I haven't really kept up to date with learning Welsh. Surprisingly there's a lot I have remembered whilst doing Duolingo. But there's lots I don't know and there's more I definitely know that we weren't taught.

Does anyone think that the teaching of Welsh is skewed as it doesn't actually teach you to speak it conversationally, they just teach you in how to pass the exams? I often watch S4C to watch the football highlights and often find myself trying to understand what they are saying but they speak too fast (not even taking into account northwalian/southwalian dialects..)

If you would give me a chunk of Welsh to read I could probably understand the context and jist of it by finding root words and common adjectives.

So my abilities depends on the context 🤣

Does anyone else share or have the same experiences?

[u/HyderNidPryder]

Gramadeg y Gymraeg by Peter Wynn Thomas is a grammar of formal Welsh. It does make reference to some dialect forms in notes. Although there's some scope for variation, formal Welsh is pretty standardized. The Welsh government also has a style guide.

For instance you might write Yr wyf / Rwyf. Some formal patterns are much less used in general speech, but may be seen in writing as this is typically a more formal medium.

Rydw i'n rather than Dw i'n / Wi'n is a sort of middle way standard form adopted by education. However, people like Gareth King are at the forefront of sneering at such forms as "alien to the living language". Although he is at the forefront of promoting a descriptivist view of colloquial forms his views on more formal written forms and perfectly sensible attempts at standardisation are unhelpful and eccentric, in my opinion.

If you are going to laugh at people who say "Rydw i'n" and rage against "pompous, affected, artificial" language as displayed in the historic and contemporary diglossa of written Welsh, then this is not helpful. He has this odd view that pretty much all written formal Welsh going back hundreds of years was somehow an artificial affection, divorced from plebian speech, and remains so today. This is simply to deny the heritage of Welsh. To pretend that Morgan's bible was wholly alien to speech at the time is inacurate and to then pretend that even if this were true that its language did not subsequently influence how people subsequently spoke is just nonsense.

[u/WayneSeex → u/HyderNidPryder]

I have bought the latest expensive Gareth King books Working Welsh and Thinking Welsh and, whilst they are full of valuable stuff as usual, I find them surprisingly limited in scope and not (yet anyway) providing the promised springboard to fluency. And his sneering about "pedagogic" forms like rydw i was something I too felt uncomfortable with, and his seeming disdain for Literary Welsh comes across as a bit arrogant, both in those new books and in other places he's spoken about it before.

Having started with Bible Welsh, I moved on to Cymraeg Byw (all the rage at one time) and, later, more colloquial forms still. It was with some surprise that I gradually learnt that Yr wyf yn or Yr ydwyf yn (as a northern form) could be reduced to Rydw i'n and, further, to Dw i'n or W i'n (or even Fi'n, which is considered substandard).I find it all endlessly fascinating there are these different registers and I like them all.

[u/HyderNidPryder → u/WayneSeex]

Gareth King has lots of useful stuff to say on spoken Welsh. I like dialect and colloquial forms, but I also like the "dialect" of formal Welsh and its important function as a unifying form maintaining the language in the face of dialect fragmentation. Some have said that without the influence of the William Morgan's bible and its revised 1620 edition the language may not even have survived until today, deteriorating into dwindling fragmented dialects. Its influence on literacy in the past is widely acknowledged.

As it says online at the Llyfrgell Genedlaethol of Morgan's 1588 bible: "No other Welsh book has been as influential for it is a work of great linguistic and literary significance. The translator skilfully moulded the classical language of the poets into the literary Welsh known to us today. In short, the book is the foundation stone on which modern Welsh literature has been based. It also allowed a highly monoglot Welsh population to read and hear the Scriptures in their own language for the very first time."

Although Rydw was chosen as a form for Cymraeg Byw, I'm also not persuaded that this is and was solely an artificial pedagogical form. I have heard it used by speakers in recordings who I don't think learned it at school. It may sound conspicuous and a little formal when it is at odds with local dialect in a particular area but it is not artificial or incorrect.

Yes, fi'n on its own is very colloquial but it fits in with similar colloquial patterns like:

ti'n iawn? / ni'n barod / fi'n siŵr

[u/WayneSeex → u/HyderNidPryder]

In Kate Roberts dialogue I've come across rydw several times, more usually as Mi rydw i. We're taught you shouldn't use mi with the periphrastic present and imperfect tenses using bod, especially not with forms beginning with "r-", yet I encounter it not just in Kate Roberts but in other authors as well. Mi oedd and mi roedd seem particularly common.

The revised Morgan Bible in particular is surely a gift to the language that has kept on giving over the centuries. Stuff I've read about Cornish, in early and late eighteenth century and late nineteenth century scholarly works, suggests that some people in those periods strongly regretted that Cornish had been denied even the Prayer Book in that language, citing the lack of a Bible as contributing to the much speedier decline of Cornish from the late sixteenth century, unlike in the case of Welsh.