Welsh Studies

Liturgy-like displayed in this cywydd-genre -Method of ‚dyfalu', i.e. increased use of metaphors cf. metaphysical poets (17th c.) and their use of conceits -an extended metaphor with a complex logic, juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways -A conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness

This drafts gives an overview over major steps in the shift of use of society-building pagan concepts as displayed in Insular Celtic literature to their oppressive abuse by Norman-Christian conquerors. The re-interpretation of pagan  concepts as expressed in literary motifs formed part of the ideological discourse to ensure the establishment of a much more hierarchical feudal society..

This article uncovers the origins of one of the major famous and important literary motif in Welsh literature - Blodeuwedd. It describes its journey from Mesopotamia to Wales through the ages accompanied by its Christian devaluation and modern revival. In the last decades, this Welsh motif has become a successful literary Welsh motif export.

When discussing aspectuality, a distinction is normally made between grammatical and lexical aspect. Both are linked, to varying degrees, to the category of tense. The existence of grammatical aspect in a language is normally accepted if it is fully expressed in a grammatical category, preferably a verbal one, as seems to be prototypically encoded in some Slavic languages. Questions concerning aspect have been posed for Welsh, since perfectivity could be expressed by the verbal particle ro-in its older stages. However, Modern Welsh differentiates synthetically between six tenses for the verb bod 'to be' and four for all of the others (save defective verbs) in the Indicative, the category looked at here. It is little surprising, therefore, that the aspect dichotomy of perfectivity vs. imperfectivity is not expressed morphologically. However, based on field work, it has been established that issues of aspectuality in Welsh are typically expressed by employing its periphrastic VSO structure, i.e. verb-noun constructions with linking elements of varying synsemantica between the finite VS-and the "O-phrase" (complement).

This draft makes clear that the system of Welsh pronouns is very different from that of the SAE-languages and strongly linked to VSO-syntax, i.e. major pronoun categories in Welsh are determined by their syntactic use and should not be termed on the basis of Latin-orientated grammar terminology.

Delivered 22 July 2016 at the NAASWCH Conference (Harvard University)

Between 1964 and 1979, every Labour Home Secretary either sat for a Welsh Seat, or was Welsh by birth. Several more Welsh MPs also served in junior capacities at the Home Office. Whilst it would be simplistic to suggest that this coincidence had an effect on the management and culture of a predominantly Oxbridge-educated, London based institution, one could argue that policy initiatives pursued by a Welsh-born minister could have been influenced by their background. When asked to name a famous Welsh politician, most would turn to one of the two great orators, David Lloyd George or Aneurin Bevan. Yet Roy Jenkins, a native of Pontypool and son of Monmouthshire miners leader Arthur Jenkins, was Home Secretary twice, between 1965-67 and 1974-76, as well as
serving as a popular Chancellor between 1967 and 1970. His term in this office is still lauded as an era of effective and progressive reform. Jenkins famously oversaw the passing of legislation on liberalising the
states attitude to abortion, theatre censorship and homosexuality. However, what is often forgotten is the important role he played in making the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, 1968 a reality.

In his lecture about Jenkins in Parliament, Andrew Adonis has argued that his tenure was exemplar of the ‘transformational minister’. This claim, however, is based on Jenkins’ support for wider, equally
progressive legislation to create a ‘civilised’ society, and does not pay attention to his attempts at reforming Race Relations apparatus. Before his intervention, the Race Relations Act (1965) had been passed as a mere palliative, doing little to alleviate racial discrimination that had permeated some sections of British society. It was Jenkins who had the defining impact on the development of this liberalising legislation. His parliamentary and public intervention, promoting the improving race relations legislation in the mid-1960s did more for the cause than the myriad of metropolitan liberal campaign groups active in the field. Jenkins was a trailblazer in the development of post-war integration.

In a speech widely described as his best, Jenkins argued that integration relied on equal opportunity, cultural diversity and mutual tolerance. He was critical of attempts to disparage the purity of an existing little Englander mentality, arguing ‘If it were to happen to the rest of us, to the Welsh (like myself), to the Scots, to the Irish, to the Jews, to the mid-European, and to still more recent arrivals, it would be little
short of a national disaster’. Jenkins rarely spoke of his Welshness within the political arena, so his summoning of this oft suppressed identity over the issues of integration, multiculturalism and identity is
deserving of greater attention. Within the wider debates over Wales as a tolerant nation, the extent to which this supposed tradition of religious and cultural tolerance influenced Jenkins in his thinking during
this period is important. This impact on race relations is undoubtedly a forgotten aspect of a full and impactful career.

This article asks what uses two minoritized cultures, Brittany and Wales, make of each other. Travel writing provides a privileged point of access to the issue, and the motif of mutual understanding between the two cultures is a key way in. Analysis of this motif in Welsh-language travel accounts to Brittany by O.M. Edwards, Tro yn Llydaw [A Tour in Brittany] (1888), Ambrose Bebb, Llydaw [Brittany] (1929), Pererindodau [Pilgrimages] (1941), and Dyfnallt, O Ben Tir Llydaw [From the Headland of Brittany] (1934) sheds light on the issues of cultural translation, periphery-periphery relations and Wales's Europeanness. The motif of mutual understanding investigated in this article ranges from claims that the two Celtic languages-Breton and Welsh-are one and the same, to affirmations of kinship, and is found across texts in different languages from Romanticism onwards. The incidence of such claims in French-language travel writing about Wales rises, following the French Revolution, and its positive valorization of Gauls, and therefore Celts, over France's Frankish ancestors. So whereas the novelist and educationalist Mme de Genlis (1746-1830), whose visit to Wales in 1792 is described in her memoirs of 1825, has recourse to Scottish and Irish points of reference (in this case Walter Scott, Ossian and Irish harps) in order to convey the Celtic otherness of Wales, more and more French writers during the course of the nineteenth century draw explicit comparisons between Brittany and Wales. 1 Historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), for instance, who travelled through north Wales en route for Ireland in summer 1834, is transported right back to Brittany by his experience of the Welsh landscape. 2 In the case of Breton-born travellers to Wales, such as the poet and song collector Hersart de la Villemarqué (1815-1895) who visited an Eisteddfod in Abergavenny in 1838, along with a delegation of fellow-Bretons, investigating and subsequently exploiting this Celtic kinship, was the main motivation for travel. At the end of the nineteenth century, the heyday of pan-Celticism, another delegation of Bretons attended an Eisteddfod held in Cardiff, and the travel writing that resulted from their visit shows a new generation of Bretons putting the idea of Celtic connections to the test sur place. 3 The motif appears in various guises, ranging from the linguistic myth of mutual comprehension to assertions that the Welsh and Bretons are cousins or siblings separated either by a geographical feature such as the sea, or indeed by time, as when one Celtic branch is referred to as the ancestors of the other. The precise form that the motif takes gives an indication of the writer's agenda, from those who exaggerate the connection by manipulating or even fabricating evidence (like La Villemarqué), to those who strive to demystify and to downplay it (like Ambrose Bebb).

Newidiodd agweddau tuag at Gymru -ei thirlun, ei mynyddoedd, ei phobl -yn syfrdanol yn y cyfnod Rhamantaidd. Cyfnod a welodd, yng ngeiriau Prys Morgan, 'one of the greatest shifts in the stereotyping of Wild Wales, away from the hostile image of incivility to one of admiration'. 1 Gan ganolbwyntio ar y delweddau o Gymru a geir mewn llenyddiaeth daith gan ymwelwyr o Saeson, dengys Morgan bod brwdfrydedd y rhain dros Gymru yn cyrraedd penllanw yn yr oes hon: 'English sympathy for things Welsh rose to a high point'. 2 Erbyn hyn, diolch i Morgan ac eraill, ac i'r tŵf ym mhoblogrwydd llenyddiaeth daith fel genre, mae agweddau ymwelwyr o Loegr tuag at Gymru yn y cyfnod Rhamantaidd wedi derbyn tipyn o sylw. 3 Da o beth, felly, fyddai medru cymharu agweddau'r Saeson gydag eiddo teithwyr a sylwebyddion o'r tu hwnt i Loegr. Yn yr erthygl hon byddaf yn defnyddio testunau Ffrangeg eu hiaith o'r cyfnod i gyfoethogi ein dealltwriaeth o'r newid hwn, a fu mor allweddol yn hanes Cymru. Yn benodol, byddaf yn archwilo'r cysylltiad rhwng hyn a'r chwyldro a fu

Ideas have never respected national boundaries. Within literary studies the concept of a national literature has been transcended, with our focus now on ‘contact zones’  and ‘translation zones’,  thanks to the rise of postcolonial studies and translation studies.  As a result, Modern Languages is currently transforming itself into a ‘transnational’,  ‘translingual’  and ‘postmonolingual’ discipline.  Welsh writing exists in more than one language, and pioneering work by M. Wynn Thomas and others has made it clear that the literatures of Wales demand to be studied together, while Daniel Williams’s work exemplifies the multicultural and comparative approach that he has long advocated. But English is not the only ‘other’ language of relevance to Wales Studies; for instance the ‘European travellers to Wales’  project has brought to light a new corpus of writing about Wales in various European languages, that informs us about Wales’s place in the European imagination and about cultural exchanges between Wales and the continent. My paper will first outline some findings from this project, before focusing on cultural exchange between Wales and Brittany as an example of Wales’s micro-cosmopolitanism.  It will argue that a multilingual, transnational approach is required to establish the extent to which the Wales and Brittany movements have always been internationalist in outlook. Travel writing by Welsh writers O.M. Edwards, Tro yn Llydaw (1888), Ambrose Bebb, Llydaw (1929), Pererindodau (1941), and Dyfnallt, O Ben Tir Llydaw (1934) will be discussed and used as specific examples through which to look at the issues of cultural translation, periphery-periphery relations, and Wales’s Europeanness. My discussion aims to suggest why our field of study needs to be Welsh writing in any language.

The Chair of Celtic Studies at the Humboldt-University of Berlin was closed shortly before its centenary. This paper, which forms the foreword of the book "Die Deutsche Keltologie und ihre Berliner Gelehrten bis 1945. Proceedings of the international conference on “Celtic Studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University before and during the Nationalist Socialist Period” at the Humboldt-University of Berlin, 1998, Berlin, Peter Lang Verlag, pp. 5-11, introduces the fate of this historical Chair of Celtic Studies in the wake of the unification of the two German countries GDR and FRG.

The paper was written together with Siôn R. Williams and published in: Asmus, Sabine and Barbara Braid (2014) "Unity in Diversity. Cultural and Linguistic Markers of the Concept", Cambridge: Scholars Publishing. After an overview over major developments in the social history of Welsh, structural weakness in Welsh institutions as well as an overdiversification of registers (whilst the standard is weak) and subsequent language forms are identified as major problems in its maintenance.

This article offers regularised translation strategies from Welsh into German for personal names in prose. It was published by Wacior, Slawomir; Grzegorz, Maziarczyk (eds.) in Literature and/in Culture. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 2008.

This review warns of the negative impact of language descriptions that are based on individual impressions and assumptions, but published by an influential publishing house. The result of at least 20 years reduced language descriptions is described in the the drafts 'Welsh: acquisition of distorted language as an obstacle to cultural continuity or home-made language shift' and 'Drohende sprachliche Diskontinuität des Walisischen'.
The review was published in Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 51/1999.

Due to Gwent’s position on the border between Wales and England, the historic region shares a hybrid identity of both Welshness and Englishness. During the age of traditional dialectology (e.g. 19th century until the mid-20th century), Gwent's Anglo-Welsh dialect was investigated twice, first by the SED (Survey of English Dialects; between circa 1951-1960) and then the SAWD (Survey of Anglo-Welsh dialects, circa 1971) – a testament to its ambiguous cultural/political identity. These studies provided substantial lexical information of the region. A decade ago, collections of dialectal material by BBC Voices, an internet project conducted between 2004-5, provided not only new frameworks for dialect surveying (internet-based), but also additional material for Gwent English.
This paper summarises some of the findings of a further internet-based dialect survey constructed in 2013 that elicited the speech of 44 young people in Gwent and assessed their regional lexis and their linguistic identity. The material was then compared with the historic dialect records to determine whether there had been changes in Gwent English between the 1970s and 2013. Results indicated that the region still contained lexis obtained by the SAWD and Voices, but new lexis was also recorded, some of which was of Welsh origin, whilst other sources stemmed from American English and internet slang. Their linguistic identity/perception was also, understandably, complex.

This article gives a rough overview over the societal background of the establishment of Celtic Studies in Berlin (Germany) at its historical university, i.e. the Humboldt University, formerly Friedrich-Wilhelms-University. It includes ideological driving forces and, by passing, discusses the duties and responsibilities of researchers. If taken seriously, seemingly unimportant or minor research can predict major developments like the desintegration of the UK, oublished in
Klaus D. Dutz (ed.), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 8/1998, Münster Nodus Publikationen, 105-124

This article presents basics of the Welsh pronominal system of language-focal pronouns. It is shown that this system is very different from that of the SAE-languages and strongly linked to VSO-syntax, i.e. major pronoun categories in Welsh are determined by their syntactic use and should not be termed on the basis of Latin-orientated grammar terminology.

Paper given at MLA Chicago 2014 I shall be talking about postcoloniality and translation in two Celtic cultures: Wales and Brittany, the westernmost tips of Europe. Wales and Brittany have close historical and linguistic connections: Saints moved southwards, their languages have common ancestry, and from Romantic times, at least, these Celtic cultures have been in a dialogue of mutual sympathy. This paper takes as its starting point another point of similarity: the fact that Wales and Brittany have both had the experience of living next door to a hegemonic culture, have (arguably) been colonized by that culture, and have seen the balance between the indigenous and the colonizer's languages shift radically over the centuries. As such they have had more exposure to the practice of translation than major cultures. i In Wales and Brittany, like the other Celtic regions, translation has been a fact of everyday life for large stretches of their histories. My aim today is twofold. First I ask what a close look at translation (both the idea of it, and the textual detail of it, or close-reading) can teach us about relations of power between hegemonic and 'minority' languages. To this end I take theories of postcolonial translation as a lens that allows us to focus on the balance of power in Breton and Welsh cultures. Secondly, using the insights gained from my discussion of a couple of flashpoints in the histories in translation in each region, I suggest (by way of conclusion) that Celtic postcolonial translation studies have much to offer mainstream translation studies.

This article uncovers the origins of the famous Welsh literary motif Blodeuwedd locating them in Mesopotamia. Thereafter, it displays diverging trends in the use of this motif in the literatures of Wales and England on the one hand and in the continental literature of Germany on the other.

Some misconceptions on the Welsh colour term "glas" are addressed here, e.g. there is no "grue" category in Welsh (and not in Irish or other Insular Celtic languages). "Glas" is not untranslatable. The concept of "glas" is not unusual cross-linguistically. An article tackling these problem area will appear soon.

In diesen Abhandlungen stehen die wichtigsten Fakten zur Geschichte, Landekunde sowie den Literaturen von Wales, und zwar auf Deutsch um diese Fakten einem größeren Publikum leicht zugänglich zu machen. Wertvoll dabei sind die vielen Quellenhinweise, die z.T. auch heute noch Gültigkeit haben. Man bedenke, dass es sich hierbei um eine untererforschte Minderheitenkultur handelt.

This paper discussed translation and cultural exchange between French, English and Welsh during the 1790s. The research was  undertaken as part of the AHRC-funded project on Wales and the French Revolution at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies

Since his first interactions with Welsh miners striking in London in 1929, Paul Robeson has been considered by some as an “honorary Welshman.” While the African American actor, athlete, activist, singer, and scholar never lived in Wales, he did have various interactions in Wales throughout his life. This special relationship persists on the memorial landscape of the country in various ways, but none as extensive as the Let Paul Robeson Sing! exhibition. This article extends beyond an overview of the exhibition to identify it as an example of exceptional memorialization techniques. Combining the concepts of participatory, temporary, and mobile memorialization, in order to commemorate Paul Robeson through a sensorial, spatially, and conceptually diverse program, Let Robeson Sing! exhibits memory through a unique and engaging memorial landscape. This article situates the exhibition within the techniques of participatory, temporary, and mobile memorialization, and how the combination of the three provides a unique, effective, and affective form of commemorating Paul Robeson in Wales.

Angharad Tomos, a Welsh-language campaigner who started writing when being imprisoned, masters a wide range of literature, but is a specialist in novel writing and known to anybody in Wales for her children's literature (cf. Some Notes on Children's literature in Welsh). The outstanding novel written by her was Titrwm, which was partly translated into German and published on http://www.cyfwe.org

This publication depicts largely the history of Welsh lexicography in its Celtic context, including a dictionary-orientated description of Welsh. In this context, the need of phonetic transcription, morphologically orientated hyphenation and standardisation of the language are discussed. The book contains a corpus of Insular Celtic lexicographical works until 2002, i.e. dictionaries and vocabularies of Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Manx, Breton and Welsh, of course.

In this article, the singulative is linked to the system of Welsh diminutives. The article was published in "PERSPECTIVES ON CELTIC LANGUAGES", edited by Maria Bloch-Trojnar in Lublin Studies in Celtic Languages, vol. 6, Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2009, 187-198.

This paper examines the radical shift in the place of Celts in the French imagination during the course of the nineteenth century, by focusing on two versions of a passage describing Wales by Michelet: the first written in his travel journal (1834), the second published by his widow (1893). Wales, by virtue of being a Celtic place, allows Michelet to deepen his understanding or France. Whereas juxtaposition of the two versions of his text reveals something of the French state’s attitude towards the ambiguously domestic and exotic Celtic ‘other’.

This article investigates the linguistic situation in medieval Wales and searches for interpreters and translators as well as their potential tools there. The article was published in: Poppe, E. & H.L.C. Tristram (eds.), Übersetzung, Adaption und Akkulturation im insularen Mittelalter, Münster: Nodus Publikationen.

Some misconceptions on the Welsh colour term "glas" are addressed here, e.g. there is no "grue" category in Welsh (and not in Irish or other Insular Celtic languages). "Glas" is not untranslatable. The concept of "glas" is not unusual cross-linguistically. An article tackling these problem area will appear soon.

What is the Gower dialect? Where did it come from, and is it still used today?

In this book you will not only find discussion about the history of the dialect – one of the oldest English dialects outside England – but also a range of old historical Gower words split into several thematic chapters. From describing words to words for food and drink to animal and plant terms to names for objects, people, & events, and a list of local idioms and phrases.

We hope this book will suit many readers. Whether you’re a local resident interested in local language history, a writer interested in adding old Gower dialect to their stories, a chef looking for recipe ideas, or even a botanist interested in old names for plants, look no further than The Gower Glossary!

Read the free ebook: https://issuu.com/swansea/docs/44028-18_gower_glossary_english?e=1073324/66015709