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[ysgolgymraeg]

Greeting 2 part 2

Sut - How Wedi blino - Tired (lit. have tired) Sori - Sorry

[ysgolgymraeg]

Greeting 2

Pwy - Who

Dw i (‘n) - I am

Dych chi (n) - You are

Draig - Dragon

[ysgolgymraeg]

Greeting 1 part 2

Hwyl - Bye

Croseo - Welcome

[ysgolgymraeg]

Many supporters, with the best intentions, will often claim that “Welsh is the oldest language in Europe” (or one of). I wish they wouldn’t say this, because it’s untrue. It’s worse than that, in fact, because it’s not even wrong, in the sense that the claim itself doesn’t make sense. It’s a bit like claiming that your family is older than someone else’s family. All families, and all languages, ultimately share a common ancestor, so really they’re all as old as each other. Throughout history, parts of one family dynasty or clan have gone on to start another, yet at the time nobody would have noticed the difference. It’s the sort of thing that you can only observe with hindsight (rather like the emergence of new families of species in biological evolution). In the same way, the point at which a modern language is said to have sufficiently developed from its predecessor is rather arbitrary, and an academic convenience more than anything else. […] The distinction between two languages is political rather than scientific. Norwegian and Danish are classified as two separate languages even though they are much more similar than the versions of vernacular Arabic spoken in Mauritania and Oman, for example, which we merly call dialects. Again, my point is simply that these labels are mainly social constructs. I’m guessing that many of Europe’s languages claim to be among the continent’s “oldest”. Basque, famously, isn’t closely related to any other language in Europe and is said to be a survivor from the time before the Indo-Europeans arrived. Lithuanian, meanwhile, is sometimes called Europe’s most conservative language since it retains many ancient linguistic elements that others have long lost. Both, it may be conceded, would have a better claim to the “oldest language” title than Welsh, but it wouldn’t really be a linguistically meaningful thing to say in those cases either. You may, very reasonably, ask whether any of this really matters. But even if it were true (which it isn’t), I would also argue that it isn’t actually a particularly helpful point for the language’s supporters to be making. Do we really want to imply that our language is some sort of curious fossil? Emphasising Welsh’s so-called antiquity plays into the hands of those who seek to dismiss the language as unfit for the modern age.

Why Welsh makes a good point about the problem with “oldest language” claims that are often brought up in the context of language revitalization. (Although I will note that sign languages are a possible exception: they may inherit gestures that are as old as humanity as inspiration for some signs and some have roots in older sign languages, but other sign languages are genuinely very young.)

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Greeting 1

Bore - Morning

Nos - Night

Prynhawn - Afternoon

Da - Good

Helo - Hello