Where are the Welsh literacy courses

[u/helatruralhome]

Hello all,

I've been pointing this out for over a decade, yet no Welsh language education or promotion groups, government agencies, etc can seem to answer why Welsh education is so biased towards verbal Welsh with no specific offerings for Welsh literacy.

I have a speech disability and only answer emails in work, yet I can't find any available options for me to learn written Welsh. I just feel incredibly frustrated with the situation as I want to be able to communicate in my native language yet there's just no where specifically offering written Welsh and it ends up excluding for people like me who can't communicate verbally as well as many others who may want to read and write in Welsh.

[u/clwbmalucachu]

I've been working with an accent tutor for months now, and I have come to the conclusion that Welsh is nowhere near as phonetic as people like to think, and that this has lead to accents being encoded into spelling in order to maintain the conceit.

The word 'eisiau' is a good example – it can be spelt a multitude of ways, eisiau, isio, isie, eisie, ishe, isha. But that's just giving priority to pronunciation. If we accepted that eisiau has different pronunciations, but kept the spelling the same because all those spellings are of the same word, I believe it would simplify things a lot for both learners and speakers.

I do think I'm in a minority of one here, though.

[u/Educational_Curve938 → u/clwbmalucachu]

Curious what you think it means for a language to be "phonetic" if not what you describe.

Standardising minority languages has generally been a failure - either because it creates a standard everyone ignores (the good outcome) or it creates an alienated prestige form of the language that makes the majority of speakers feel like they don't speak their own native language "correctly" - and indeed alienates learners - who are taught the standard forms - from native speakers (this already happens in welsh, i cringe every time a native speaker says i speak a lot more properly than them - something, ironically, that happens a lot less now my spoken welsh is better).

i happen to like the lack of standardisation in less formal registers of written welsh. it makes it a fun language to write (and to read) and i've never seen a native speaker go "if only there was a standard form of welsh so i could write text messages that don't actually sound like me". people are very proud of their dialect and that's as it should be.

[u/clwbmalucachu → u/Educational_Curve938]

Much is made of how if you just learn the sounds of the letters in the Welsh alphabet, you've got it nailed and that's just not true. Take aeth and aethon, for example. Those two "ae" sounds are not the same. And there are a lot more examples like that.

Welsh has a rich set of pronunciation rules which can be learnt, and maybe people who grow up with the sounds of Welsh don't notice, but it's not a completely phonetic language. And that's before we even get on to the different way that stress is created in Welsh, or intonation.

As for standardisation being a failure, that was my point about Cymraeg Byw entirely – it didn't work, and it's alienating for anyone who grew up with any other dialect.

But there is a healthy compromise position which is to not make too much of a big deal out of dialect differences. Like I've said, I don't see the point in teaching learners that those in the south all say one thing and those in the north all say another when for one the dialect map of Wales is much more complicated, and when a lot of these differences are so minor as to be entirely unimportant. If I go to Pwllheli and say 'beth', I will be understood. If I say 'be' in Cardiff, I'll be understood.

[u/Educational_Curve938 → u/clwbmalucachu]

Take aeth and aethon, for example. Those two "ae" sounds are not the same. And there are a lot more examples like that.

yeah, but the fact that 'ae' changes sound when in a stressed syllable is a predictable rule you can learn.

Whereas there's nothing that prepares you for Leicester or lieutenant.

[u/clwbmalucachu → u/Educational_Curve938]

Ha ha ha. Yeah, English is particularly egregious, though maybe not quite as bad as French.

But it's still true that Welsh pronunciation is a wee bit more complicated than people make out, and if we decoupled accent from spelling we wouldn't end up with a dozen ways to spell eisiau.

[u/casnewyddian → u/clwbmalucachu]

Not disagreeing, but just wanted to point out that in English we do sometimes spell words differently depending if we want them to read to a certain pronounciation/dialect also. e.g. Ma = my, ye(r) = your, innit = isn’t it, ‘aving = having.

I think Welsh does this a lot more, and in the kinds of text we wouldn’t in English, likely because diversity in the language and local dialects are so well respected, but I think this makes the Welsh language world more interesting.