Ancestors

Written by merlin / alex glow on 2025-01-05 at 20:47

I've been picking up some Welsh on Duolingo (likely inspired by @suearcher ), and it is a DELIGHT! Here are some cool things I've noticed so far.

(This is in spite of the app's awful AI rollout, which is straight-up wrong at times... but that's a topic for another day 😅)

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Written by merlin / alex glow on 2025-01-05 at 20:55

Once you learn the spelling conventions, lots of words are close cognates to English: ciwb (cube!), siaced (jacket), brecwast (breakfast), ysgol (school), afal (apple), Sbaen (Spain)...

Some are similar to archaic or uncommon English words! Ffrog (dress/frock), perthyn (belong/pertain), tafarn (bar/tavern), hosan (sock/hose)...

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Written by merlin / alex glow on 2025-01-05 at 21:01

Some are close to other Romance languages: mêl (honey), eglwys (church), nos (night), yr Almaen (Germany)...

"Siop lyfrau" (bookshop) combines both English and Romance cognates!

The days of the week are generally pretty Romantic (dydd Llun/Mawrth/Mercher...) – except Saturday (dydd Sadwrn).

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Toot

Written by merlin / alex glow on 2025-01-05 at 21:10

I'm finding it pretty approachable as a multilingual native English speaker. So far (so far!!), there don't seem to be a lot of suffixes to juggle for conjugation, adjectives, or possessives.

That said, there's a hard/soft duality at some word boundaries, which will take me a minute to fully grok (coch/choch, wyn/gwyn, tafarn/dafarn...). Should probably just look it up!

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Descendants

Written by merlin / alex glow on 2025-01-05 at 21:12

Anyway, it's a lovely language, with a lilting quality that makes me replay some of the longer sentences just to hear them again.

And you can clearly see some places where Tolkien took inspiration for Elvish! My little high-school heart is happy :D

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Written by 🌈☔🌦️🍄 on 2025-01-05 at 21:49

@alexglow Reminds me of Irish, which I don't speak, but I found irish names relatively easy to remember.

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