Re: A media?

Mike, excuse the top post to your excellent message here, only a note or two
below;

"Mike Lyle" <mike_lyle_uk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1136851883.176986.82960@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chess One wrote:
> "patrana" <pati@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:428jv4F1ho5dsU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >
> > "Mike Lyle" <mike_lyle_uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> escribió en el mensaje
> > news:427li3F1hp77mU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >
> >>> From a position safely outside Wales I would suggest that the Welsh
> >>> language is an imposition on the bureaucracy rather than the other
> >> way
> >>> round. I would word that very differently if I were in Wales.
> >>
> >> As a historical statement of who did what to whom, it'll stand
> >> perfectly well. We get into more Pati-ish waters in
> >> non-Welsh-speaking districts, though.
> >>
> > You mean where the population of a predominantly English-speaking
> > country
> > is have a minority language forced upon them so that a few nationalists
> > can make them all read the Mabinogion?

The figures are maddeningly difficult even for a professional
statistician; but I suppose it's safe to say that something like 15% of
the population of Wales as a whole are mother-tongue Welsh speakers,
while maybe as many as two-thirds don't speak Welsh at all. There are
conflicting figures which would put the number of Welsh-speakers
higher. But it's still a minority, if we can divest the word of any
value overtones. One of the statistical problems, though, is the
geographical distribution: in Welsh-speaking areas, the number of
mother-tongue speakers could rise to maybe 90% or more of those _born_
in the area: but how are the areas to be defined? Where we lived, it
was safe to say that any resident who was Welsh by birth was a native
speaker, give or take a few professional people from the eastern
counties. A significant number of residents in Wales are not Welsh,
which adds another layer of complication.

Pati may perhaps be drawing a false analogy with the Catalan
experience: in Catalonia the Catalan language is enforced by means
which would be illegal in the UK. In the case of non-Catalan children,
those means may in my opinion amount to child-abuse: my
Castilian-speaking nephew was treated in kindergarten in such a way as
to have tempted me to burn the place down. I've heard of a few cases of
similar treatment in one-teacher village schools in rural Wales, but I
couldn't document them. The position in Wales is, in essence, that any
citizen may choose, at any time, in which of the two languages of the
country he wishes to conduct official business. (I was in the country
when that was not the case.) Her rhetorical point about the Mabinogion
is, of course, mere rhetoric -- and pretty silly at that. She is quite
wrong to align the language movement with "a few nationalists": the
issue has little to do with political nationalism, as the
Welsh-language movement is supported by political conservatives and
unionists just as the Welsh National Party (which is not a
"nationalist" party) is supported (especially post-Blair) by non-Welsh
speakers.

The promotion of the language has had its swings and roundabouts, of
course: in some places an inferior candidate may sometimes get a job
because the best candidate doesn't speak Welsh (I myself know of two
possible cases, both overbalanced by appointments of English people to
other jobs in which they'd arguably have been more effective if they'd
spoken Welsh). But, then, how are we going to define an "inferior
candidate"?

There's also the outflow problem: it's impossible to imagine Richard
Burton would have been content with a career in Welsh-language
television.

Burton raises a relevant point. There are many native speakers of Welsh
who hesitate to call themselves "fluent speakers", even though they
are. Similarly -- and this is anecdotal, but it is first-hand -- there
are umpteenth-generation native speakers who fear that their Welsh
isn't "proper": some of our farmers were nervous about sending their
children to the Welsh-medium secondary school in Carmarthen because
they feared the children might be discriminated against for not
speaking book Welsh.

There's also the odd phenomenon that Welsh people, whether
Welsh-speakers or not, seem to Anglicise very readily. The BBC, as
everybody knows, is staffed disproportionately by Celts: but while the
Irish and the Scots remain audibly Irish and Scottish to the end of
their careers, one is often hard put to it to identify the Welsh. The
same applies in other UK professions, too.

> > Does that mean that Dylan Tomas is not a Welsh poet but an "English"
> > one?
> > And if he is a Welsh poet, why did he write only in English and not
> > Welsh?

I don't understand the point of this question. He was Welsh, and he was
a poet, and he wrote in English. It's quite irrelevant whether or not
he spoke Welsh.

>
> Good points.

See above. This is where we came in, Phil. I'm back from returning the
youngest to the bosom of her university, post-Christmas essay crises
happily resolved, and now honour my promise to study your message with
the help of Marston's Pedi.

> But there is a necessary distinction between Culture and
> Politics in Wales, which is exactly the same situation as in Cornwall.
> Celtic nations are not radically, but distinctly, different in cultural
> orientation to English or Saxon culture.

Agreed.

** And in your opinion, is this subtle but potent differentiation broadly
understood? That of Culture to Polity? Do many writers here notice it?

> Language obviously has greater affinity with culture than with politics,
> and
> if Welsh activists are overly insistent on Welsh langauge as first
> language
> for the people, this is perhaps overdone; and even not representative of
> the
> people themselves, and more strident than might seem necessary.

But it doesn't often happen like that. I've knowingly encountered maybe
two "Cymric Fascists" over the decades, but they were oddballs. Even
they had no ambition to make Welsh the whole people's first language.

**Ay, understood - much the same in the Mebyon Kernow crowd. Some Welshman I
was holed up with in Germany taught me to sing the bleinai ffestinog song
[sp?] and we roared it out in the German woods, when the elderly local
leute, unthinking that we mi9ght understand them, boasted a bit about their
contribution to the war effort, to some camps, how well administered...

And all this was innocent of them since these were not konzentrationlager,
and only national pride at a job well done. Meanwhile the Welshman and I
observed it with no particular animus, only contrast - but as somewhat
emblematic of expressions of our teachers in our new Germanic language.

> Yet its an
> understandable stridency, since otherwise there is a distinct tendency for
> majority cultures to ignore minor ones completely, and by non-cultural
> means - by political means - to extinguish them as non-uniform problems to
> political-administration.

That's fair comment; but the stridency is limited, and not much
respected in the Welsh-speaking community at large. Perhaps the most
"Welshist" of my farmer neighbours was actually politically
Conservative (majuscule and minuscule "c"). He made the interesting
point that there was actually no point in my family's efforts to learn
the language, because it really only amounted to anything if one had
learned it "at the hearth", absorbing the whole culture: if all we
wanted to do was talk to people, then what was wrong with English? (I
told him we had no intention of becoming Welsh, but that it was about
respect, which he conceded. When one of my neighbours caught her hand
in an agricultural machine, it would have been OK to ask how she was in
English, but it was a damned sight more comforting to both of us that I
was able to do it in the tongue of her mother.)

Ay - you say something profound in this.

> O'Brian lived in Wales for a time, and his Celtic character Maturin is
> found
> to say [albeit on the Irish Question, and cultural enslavement generally
> as
> witnessed in Napoleon's Continental System] that he held that the people
> themselves should decide their own fate, right or wrong.
>
> At least in theory, this idea seem better upheld in the United States,
> where
> a popular tenet is to speak of 'self-determination'.

That's right. Not much more to be said, really. Just as well, given the
length of this message; but I did promise a more considered reply.

**You are very good.

Once I was in a workshop on the causes of hatred, and in the next chair
around the circle next to me was 'Anna from Auschwitz'.

She wore dark colours, knitted the whole time, said nothing cheerful, and
not much at all, until perhaps the fourth day of this affair, when some
Dutch kids spoke with a German kid [young 20's] during a break across the
circle, and they spoke of which teas there were, mint or organic, and such
stuff, but they spoke in German.

There was a cold claw on my arm, and Anna said to me "Phil, I cannot hear
this language" and her eyes were rolling in her head in pre-syncope, so I
picked her up, [I am a big man and she weighed nothing] and took her outside
where we walked in the gardens awhile and she said nothing.

Such is the power over the dispossessed of language. More emotionally
frightening was that hand on my arm that any newsreel footage or statistic.

Later, she looked at me, concerned lest her liefelessness should become any
romantic cause celebre of my own [you understand Mike?] - silent though -
her sense was communicated by a look.

She was a dead-one still living, though had this still, something beyond
which any human being may not be reduced, and this was a lesson to me,
indeed.

Should we ever forget our humanity under any form of duress which would
reduce the essense of any other, I do so recommend this essense of who we
are, bought at considerable cost.

Heuch! I can scarcely see what I am writing.

Phil





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