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Welsh Philologists
The Link Between Asian and European Languages
Europe's Last Romani Spoken in Wales
Welsh in Warfare
Welsh Words in English
WELSH
PHILOLOGISTS
Philology is the study of ancient texts and languages.
As a people, the Welsh are renowned for their love of language,
as evidenced by the annual Eisteddfod, Europe's largest traveling
cultural festival. Over the years, Wales has produced many notable
philologists:
John Davies published the first grammar and dictionary
of Tahitian.
David Jones was the first person
to put the Malagasy language of Madagascar into writing.
Robert Jones compiled the first comprehensive dictionary
of the Cornish language.
Dr. David Samuel made the first
written record of the Maori language of New Zealand.
Bishop John Phillips translated the book of common
prayer into Manx.
THE
LINK BETWEEN ASIAN AND EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
Sir William Jones was a Welsh scholar employed by the East
India Company. In the late 18th century he discovered that many
words in Sanskrit, the language of Hindu holy books, were similar
to words in Welsh. The German brothers Grimm and others carried
out further research and revealed that most European languages and
some Indian ones have a common ancestor known as Indo-European.
EUROPE'S
LAST ROMANI SPOKEN IN WALES
Welsh gypsies were
the last to speak Romani in Europe. In the early 1900's John Sampson,
an expert on Gypsy lore, discovered that a family in Wales still
spoke the "deep" or inflected Romani that had died out
among the rest of the gypsy groups in Europe. Romani is a dialect
of Hindu, for Gypsies originally came to Europe some time in the
13th or 14th century. In Britain, their dark complexion and their
strange tongue led them to be called Egyptians or Gypsies.
WELSH IN WARFARE
Secure communications are often difficult to achieve in
wartime. Cryptography can be used to protect messages, but codes
can be broken. Therefore, little-known languages are sometimes encoded,
so that even if the code is broken, the message is still in a language
few people know. For example, Navajo code talkers were used by the
United States military during World War II. Similarly, the Royal
Welch Fusiliers, a Welsh regiment serving in Bosnia, used Welsh
for emergency communications that needed to be secure. During the
1982 Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom, there
were stories of British soldiers speaking Welsh with captured Argentinian
soldiers who were descendants of Welsh immigrants to the Chubut
Valley in Patagonia. [Source: Wikipedia]
WELSH WORDS IN ENGLISH
English shows surprisingly few signs of direct influence
from Welsh, although there are a few Welsh words in its vocabulary.
Some are obvious like avon. avalon, coomb,
coracle, corgi, cromlech and eisteddfod.
Some are much less obvious, like car, gull and
penguin.
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