The second-longest known place name in the world refers to a location in Wales:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysilio-gogogoch
What does it mean? “Saint Mary’s Church in a hollow of white hazel near the swirling whirlpool of the church of Saint Tysilio with a red cave.” (Honesty forces me to admit that there are shorter forms of this name; the long version was invented in 1860 as a promotional tool.) How is it pronounced?
The phonetic spelling for English speakers that’s given at the train station of the town is: Llan-vire-pooll-guin-gill-go-ger-u-chwurn-drob-ooll-llantus-ilio-gogo-goch. That spelling doesn’t quite jibe with the pronunciations the Chorale has been given by a real Welsh speaker, but I guess it’s close enough. If you carefully compare the guide to the actual words you’ll see that some of the vowel lack disappears, as w’s are sometimes (but not always) used as an “oo” sound. Y’s are pretty much always used as vowels, too. Plus the Welsh seem to be very fond of double l’s, which give the appearance of silting up the words with consonants. So it’s not as bad as it looks. Even so, there’s no question that Welsh is a pretty weird-looking language. Where on earth did it come from? It’s a branch of the Celtic languages that spread into Britain before Roman times, six of which survived into modern times and four of which are still spoken today. As I mentioned in the previous post on the Celts, those four are: Irish and Scottish Gaelic (descended from Old Irish) and Welsh and Breton (descended from Old Brittonic). Is everybody now thoroughly confused? Good. That means you’ve grasped the situation.
The Welsh language has been preserved in use even though there have been stretches of history when its use was forbidden by officials and schoolchildren. (This tactic has been used any number of times throughout history, even here in the US. My Dutch Mennonite father, who grew up speaking only “Low German,” was forbidden to speak that language in the school he attended in the 1920’s, as the US had been at war with Germany during the First World War. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?) Today there are estimated to be 500,000 to 750,000 Welsh speakers, although it’s safe to assume that all of these people also speak English. As the world becomes more and more homogenized we see the value of individual cultures, including language, but it’s an uphill battle. Who knows how many Welsh, or Navajo, or Gullah, or Bantu click language speakers there will be 50 years from now?As long as we’re on the subject of the Welsh language, let’s dive a little into Wales’ own name for itself. Not surprisingly, it’s not Wales. It’s Cymru, often anglicized into “Cambria,” meaning “fellow countrymen.” The Anglo-Saxon invaders called the settlers already living in Britain “the strangers” or wealas. Kind of ironic, isn’t it? Since the Anglo-Saxons won, at least temporarily before being overrun by the Normans, they got to call the native people foreigners. And since it’s always fashionable to belittle those you’ve conquered, someone who reneged on a debt or a bet was called a “welsher” and a dish of melted cheese on bread was called “Welsh rabbit”–also spelled “rarebit”–signifying that the Welsh were too poor to eat meat and had to make do with cheese. (Just as the word “gyp,” meaning to cheat, is derived from “Gypsy,” and “Indian giver” is someone who takes back a gift. And “Indian summer” is a warm stretch in fall that deceives us into thinking that winter isn’t coming after all.)
Finally, in this rather idiosyncratic survey of Welsh culture, what of its flag, with its red dragon and green/white background? While we’ll never be able to determine exactly how the dragon emblem originated (although theories abound), we do know that it was associated with ancient Welsh kings, especially the rousingly-named Cadwalader ap Cadwallon. The green and white colors were associated with the Tudors, a Welsh side-shoot of the royal line of England. When the soon-to-be Henry VII marched through England on his way to defeat Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 he carried what was basically the Welsh flag. After his victory he brought the flag to St. Paul’s Cathedral to be blessed. (I find Henry VII to be rather a creep, but that’s primarily because I’m a pro-Richard III kind of girl.) Henry VII’s son was, of course . . . Henry VIII (no question about his creepiness), who decided that Wales needed to become part of England and passed two Acts of Union; at that point Wales ceased to be an independent country. Have you ever wondered, by the way, why the heir to the British throne is always called the “Prince of Wales”? This tradition supposedly dates back to 1301, when Edward I promised the Welsh that he would name a prince of that country who spoke no English and then produced his infant son, who had indeed been born in Wales and of course spoke no language at all. Alas, the story is probably apocryphal, but at some point it did become the norm for the heir to the throne to be invested with this title. And so we have Prince Charles of today, who may or may not have a single drop of Welsh blood in him. (The current royal family, the House of Windsor, is actually German, with “Windsor” being a made-up name that sounded more English than their real name, which was “Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.”)
So I’ll say “hwyl fawr am nawr” (“good-bye for now”). I have two more weeks to get in as much as I can about the our wonderful music and the country that produced it.
