I just finished a Welsh class.
Which strikes me as curious enough a claim, besides the fact that it was actually Middle Welsh - that is, the Welsh that came before the Welsh spoken today. I can barely read it, let alone speak it, yet the fact that I am now familiar with what amounts to a semi-dead language other than Greek or Latin, and is also distinct from other tongues commonly studied at university, seems like excuse enough to indulge in a unbecoming and wholly uncalled-for sense of pride. Yet while I hope to suppress such urges beneath a veneer of self-deprecation, I would like to offer some sampling of my new-found knowledge to the general public as a means of introducing this fascinating language.
A joke that I frequently encountered during the semester is "Ah Welsh, the language with no vowels." This impression is easily understood by referencing the following phrase taken from the website for St. David's Cathedral:
"Pwyswch yma i fynd i mewn yn Gymraeg"*
While funny, I must observe that the joke is in fact false: Welsh does have a vowel, thank you very much! And the Welsh get a great deal of mileage out of it!
That said, the discerning reader will have noticed several vowels in the quote, most notably the two i's, the e's, and the a. More important to the Welsh, by far, are the y's, but what will perhaps surprise the reader of English most is the equally-frequent application of w. W's have two sounds in Middle (and modern) Welsh: that which English speakers are familiar with when used before vowels (i.e. with) and when between consonants, an oo sound (shoot). Thus pwyswch above is pronounced something like "poo-EES-ooch" (the ch pronounced like the composer Bach). Indeed, Welsh makes use of every vowel used in English, with a few extras, depending upon where the Welsh speaker hails from, and as such becomes relatively easy to read with practice. The grammar is also comparatively easy to master, again in a relative sort of way. Students of foreign languages will likely rejoice at the simplicity of Middle Welsh - our professor tells us that as of the close of semester we were about 85% done with the grammar - especially when compared to paradigm-intense tongues like Latin. But where Latin is ordered in its complexity, Middle Welsh makes it practitioners pay through its comparative...oddities.
*Being a bilingual site, stdavidscathedral.org.uk offers visitors two links depending on language of choice. The above quote links to the Welsh-language option, while its English equivalent reads "Click here to enter in English"
