Currently sat in a summer school type thing we're hosting in work and some English architect is telling us about sustainable design in Wales, except she hasn't bothered learning a single Welsh name and if I have to listen to one more "I don't know how to say 'Welsh name' so I'm going to use 'shitty English name/nothing while laughing at it' I'm going to throw this slanty drawing desk at her head

Spot the unforced errors:

"Wales has three national parks. There's the one I can't pronounce so I'm going to say Brecon Beacons, there's Pembrokeshire Coast, and there's Snowdonia."

Said with that lil laugh English people do when they say this stuff, because they think they're being funny and charming in a 'what am I like' way rather than disrespectful and arrogant as fuck

"This one is by a reservoir in Gwent I can say, tee hee! Landy something, but-"

Me: Llandegfedd

Her: uh... yes, so difficult! Tee hee!

FUCK OFF

"This one is called... Um... I don't know how to say it tee hee!"

Me: Ysgir.

Her: I'm so bad at Welsh haha

YOU ARE DELIVERING A THREE QUARTER HOUR LECTURE TO WELSH STUDENTS IN WALES ABOUT WELSH INFRASTRUCTURE

YOU HAVE MULTIPLE WELSH SPEAKING COLLEAGUES CRAWLING OUT OF THE WOODWORK WHO COULD HAVE TOLD YOU

LEARNING TO PRONOUNCE THE PLACES SHOULD HAVE BEEN PRIORITY ONE YOU ARROGANT BITCH

Like listen. LISTEN. I know this is entirely normal. I know this is so exceptionally common that about 80% of English people do it, I know they think it's funny, I know they don't even see there's a problem, I know I'm basically kicking off at rain in a wet country. I don't know why this extremely normal and commonplace occurrence is nettling me this much today.

But last year, I gave a lecture on grassland management. As part of it, I told the students about the ngitili silvipastoral systems in Tanzania. I am in no way saying I'm perfect!!! I am not a template to be copied!!! But ahead of that lecture, I scoured YouTube until I found a video of an indigenous person in Tanzania talking about the system!!! And I listened to how they pronounced it, and I memorised it, and then I even wrote out the phonetic pronunciation on the slide so my students could learn too, because not bothering to learn that while then presenting myself as an authority on the subject would have been grossly appropriative and colonialist and also plain fucking rude.

And none of those students were Tanzanian for me to insult to their faces

While I can agree that it can be infuriating to have something near and dear to you be mispronounced (especially if they have that obnoxious kind of attitude about it), the issue that I’m taking from this is that it heavily ignores the fact that that is not how language works.

There is no set pronunciation. Accents exist. To steal a joke from Community, there are different ways people say bagel (Britta says it bah-gul, instead of bay-gul.) I say coyote (kie-oat) different from most people (kie-oat-tea). Words are said differently in different locations. Just looking at English in England, there are near 40 different accents. Or Japanese in Japan, which also has over 40 different accents. And there certainly isn’t only one Welsh accent. So which one of you is pronouncing the language correctly?

This type of argument also ignores the fact that some people have never encountered certain sounds before or just can’t say it for another reason. Is an Arabic speaker wrong for not being able to pronounce “P” sounds because they aren’t used to hearing them? Or a Japanese speaker for not being able to pronounce “L” sounds? Or what about English speakers who can’t roll their “R’s”? Are they just wrong because they never developed the ability to say certain sounds in their youth?

Some people also have speech impediments. This can wildly change how things are pronounced. I had to go to speech therapy* for years because I couldn’t pronounce “R’s” and “L’s” (which is kinda sad when both of them are in my name). Were kids like me just wrong because we couldn’t physically pronounce certain words?

While yes, you should be able to speak the language you are working with to at least some degree (I don’t think anyone is asking for fluency unless you are going to be living in the area), getting actively mad at someone for not being able to pronounce something is pointless in the grand scheme of things. Yes, the teacher handled this horribly, and there is nothing cute about being an asshole. But, and this is coming from a guy who will spend 10 minutes trying to make sure I pronounce someone’s name the way they want it said, pronunciations are made up. And the idea of “correct pronunciations” usually comes from the dominant group trying to oppress the minority group by treating them as inferior for how they express themselves in the spoken word, eg. People being treated as stupid for having a Texan accent. So, yeah.

*I have a rant about Speech Therapy, but this isn’t the time for that.

yes that's all very nice for certain situations, but here OP is specifically talking about

1) how this lady wouldn't even TRY

2) in a professional setting/her own specialization

3) at a language in her own political sphere of influence (within the UK)

4) with a history of linguistic oppression from the English towards the Welsh.

it's not about ability or linguistic diversity, it's about attitude, ignorance, and pre-existing power structures that are being upheld by behaviour like this and by excusing it. yes, language can be hard. no, that doesn't give you an excuse not to try, or be a dick about it. this woman was being a MASSIVE dick about it, and laughing in their faces about it to boot.

Read the post again.

If you reread my thing, I did agree with OP about how the teacher was being an ass. I will also agree that I could have been more focused on OP’s actual argument as well. My issue came from the last part, where OP made over generalizations that I definitely misread.

And, of course, I will never defend the British. Their history of oppression is well documented and, honestly, most of the time the British’s attitude towards other cultures is incredibly horrible and much worse than most are willing to admit (for anyone just randomly reading these, at one point the British basically attempted to ban Welsh in Welsh schools).

So, yes. The British government is terrible. The teacher in OP’s original post is awful. But there is still no set way to pronounce something. And I need to learn how to read, because I definitely misread English people as English speakers. Sorry, OP for that.

First off, I’d like to point out that the fact that you are repeatedly referring to “the British” here in a post specifically about how the English oppress the Welsh and routinely disrespect and disregard the Welsh language is… less than ideal.

British means “person from Britain”, which is a geographical area that, depending on if you are referring to Great Britain or the British Isles, will include England, Scotland, and Wales at minimum, as well as potentially several other places, many of which have also been victims of English cultural oppression. It is not a synonym for “English”.

Further, your commentary on this post does nothing but derail OP’s extremely valid points about the way that the English treat the Welsh language and culture and make it into a totally different topic. You also seem to insinuate that it is ableist to expect people to have the common courtesy to try to pronounce place names in other languages correctly, which is the worst possible faith response to the matter at hand.

I would really recommend that you consider why you felt it necessary to tell a Welsh person that they are wrong to be upset and offended by this blatant and casual disrespect. You clearly have some awareness of the intense history of oppression of the Welsh language, so I am frankly astonished that you think that this is an appropriate response in any way, and I really suggest that you interrogate your reasoning on this point.

To be perfectly clear, anybody speaking a language, or using place names from a language that is not their native one, will make mistakes. But in an academic setting there is no excuse not to try. It is an environment where OP has every right to expect a higher standard than one would from a person speaking in a second language because they are, for example, on holiday. And if you legitimately cannot tell the difference between regional accents and pronunciations and somebody not even making the slightest bit of effort, which is what happened here, then I frankly don’t know what to tell you.

I want to be perfectly clear that I do not intend for any of this to be an attack on you. I merely want to point out to you why your addition to this post is ill conceived, and why it comes across as disrespectful. If you want to have a conversation about linguistics and pronunciation, I would suggest that you make a new post of your own that does not address such a loaded topic and criticise people who are being directly impacted by microagressions.

Good point about the British thing. I will work on that part.

And valid points all the way through. I clearly messed up.

Thank you to everyone for their efforts on this, and to rolanthon for this acknowledgement. I have a feeling this might be becoming the little pebbles before an avalanche, so let's leave this part here. Again, though, genuine thanks to all of you, I did not have anything close to the spoons to deal with it myself tonight! No hard feelings

Also like. Just to demonstrate how lazy Colonialist English Lady is, I looked up the Welsh name of Brecon Beacons. It's Bannau Brycheiniog. The pronunciation is readily available online, but I tried saying it before looking at the pronunciation, and guess what? I wasn't right, but I was within spitting distance, just by taking a guess. The only syllable I really royally screwed up (beyond having an American accent) was the "brych" in Brycheiniog. Seeing W as a vowel in Welsh can trip you up until you're used to it (although weirdly enough, when I was growing up I was taught that W could be a vowel. I've never heard that from anyone except Welsh people and my first-grade teacher and I would love to know how she learned that pre-internet in a podunk little town in America), but it's not really all that different than, say, German pronouncing "j" as English "y" or Spanish pronouncing "i" as English "ē." It's just one more way we're all trying to use a single alphabet forced on us by a colonizing force in the triple-digits millennium. I don't say this to dunk on rolanthon, who basically made this a masterclass in how to course-correct when you're wrong. I'm saying this specifically to dunk on Colonialist English Lady. I'm sure if she'd given it an actual proper go she would have said it with an accent, but it's not hard to say. This is not a case of "people who didn't grow up with tonals can't hear tonals," it's a case of "yeah, this was just laziness and racism."

Yeah the outrageous thing about not even trying with Welsh is that while it has some particularities around what sounds certain letters make, Welsh orthography is fantastically consistent.

Irish is harder! Scots Gaelic, while very cool, manages to have possibly even less intuitive basic orthography than English, despite containing fewer phonemes and weird exceptions by way of less borrowing, because the orthography was full of strained attempts at anglicization back when it was standardized, and since that time both Gaelic and English have changed their pronunciation conventions.

So it has all those 'this sound is made three different ways' and 'this spelling makes four different sounds' difficulties that English has, context-sensitive, and loads of them are character strings.

Like, I'm not saying you're clear to not try with those languages either, but at least Gaelic is legitimately difficult not to mangle.

But Welsh is dead straightforward; you can pick it up pretty readily and be reasonably confident the rules you learn in one context will broadly apply elsewhere.

Not trying is 100% a power thing in this kind of context--if you say a word wrong, or say it correctly but with a stupid accent, you might look foolish. You might be laughed at.

I understand wanting to avoid that situation, on an emotional level, but fundamentally leaning into your imperial privilege to avoid it is a very bad look and the fact that it's endemic is the whole problem.

Point of clarification: Is trying to pronounce a word in an unfamiliar language and getting it horribly wrong somehow less offensive and embarrassing than just admitting you don't know? Because I don't particularly care for how the speaker seen by OP went about it, I do strongly relate to her desire not to humiliate herself with a swing and a miss.

Hello! OP here.

So, obviously, there are a lot of qualifiers to both halves of what you're suggesting here - there are both polite and offensive ways of trying and failing, and also polite and offensive ways of admitting you don't know. In the scenario I ranted about here, she was admitting she didn't know, and doing so offensively; had she said "I'm so sorry, I don't know this one, can someone tell me?" and then made an effort to say the answer, it would have been considerably more polite and respectful (although obviously given that this was a planned lecture, even that would have been... Problematic).

Similarly, if she'd said it wrong because she was applying English pronunciation rules, making it clear she hadn't bothered looking it up, and continued to say it wrong when corrected, that would have been rude as fuck; if she'd said it wrong because she'd applied the wrong Welsh pronunciation rules, and visibly attempted to memorise the correct pronunciation once corrected, that would have been fine.

So it's hard to say which is 'better' than the other. HOWEVER, for my money, this is what I think people just don't realise:

If you, for whatever reason, can't bring yourself to ever use someone else's language for fear of getting it wrong, you are making the choice to force them to use yours. And ultimately, while it might make all the difference to the quality of your human soul, to the person you're speaking with there is no difference between you (not using it for fear of getting it wrong) and a bigot (not using it because it's considered inferior). To them, the end result is the same - their language is removed from the proceedings, and they must use yours instead.

And if it's about something like names, as it was here, remember there are a lot of problems there such as colonial legacies. If you insist on calling Aotearoa "New Zealand" to a Māori person because you're afraid you'll mispronounce it and feel embarrassed, what you're doing is insisting on using the colonial name they're actively trying to remove, and there's a lot of race- and class-based stuff attached to that that you have just perpetuated. In the case of this specific post, the reason I flagged the national parks in particular is that this woman used both Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia, when both are now exclusively using their Welsh names (Bannau Brycheiniog and Eryri). That's problematic even beyond linguistic respect.

In any case... sorry this couldn't be a more specific answer! But yeah, that's the fundamentals. I hope it was useful.

Merlin and Arthur are one of the only boss/employee romances I’ll take and it’s honestly because Arthur thinks he’s the boss when in reality Merlin runs the show and I think that’s funny

Normal Boss/Employee Romance: Power dynamics.

Merthur: The legal boss is trying so hard, and yet the legal employee could literally tell him to jump off a cliff and he'd complain while doing it.

JAMIE FRASER ▸ Outlander, 7.3

every day i get top surgery and every night they grow back again

I've never watched a single episode of spn but I've been thinking about the implications of being stuck inside a meme

THIS IS FROM SCOOBY DOO! THIS IS NOT FUCKING SCARY. LITERALLY THE NEXT SHOT IS A GREAT DANE FARTING AND SETTING A MAN IN A COSTUME ON FIRE. 

i cannot stop laughing at send no pee

‘‘ I have a few questions that need to be answered. ’’

Piss on me. Fucking piss on me but do it in the antarctic so that the pee freezes in mid air while you are pissing off a building and the piss turns to spear’s. impale me with frozen urine and then shit on my butt corpse. Im a fat gay and I want to go to Ice Hell ftw.

So do I just like....follow...anyone? Like real people? Like the actual people and not the subject matter? That isn't like following someone to their doorstep? Why does this seem so personal???

Think of it as, you are a stray cat, and every evening I put out my garbage and you come and eat it

This garbage is now mine.

Finished this wee wip i had while wiping tears after the last episode…now I NEED to make some Brianna Fraser in the future fanarts

Followers- Dw i angen eich help / I need your help

This is a post I've been sitting on for a while and it's time I finally write it to let you all know how I am, where I'm at and the progress of Prosiect Llyfr Enfys.

So, as I alluded to in previous posts, I had a health scare at the end of May which landed me in the hospital. I've spent June recovering from that and dealing with a few life changes as well (which I will talk about later).

Unfortunately, me and my partner had to deal with an unexpected bill of £200 this month which had to come directly out of my savings and is a huge chunk of it.

I've been doing research in preparation for hopefully doing a Masters at Aberystwyth in September on the topic of LGBTQ+ Welsh terminology before the 20th Century. My undergraduate dissertation was on the topic of 20th-21st Century LGBTQ+ Welsh terminology (which is currently unmarked due to the marking boycott). Hopefully after graduation I can share it with you. But my research into older terminology means needing to travel to different archives and libraries in Wales, which at the minute, I just can't afford. The closest place would be Bangor, but I have no money to spare at the minute and Prosiect Llyfr Enfys is not funded by any scheme or grant- it's currently all funded by myself.

For the first time in my life, I've been considering using a food bank. We're not quite at that stage yet, but it's precarious. It's another unexpected bill away from a critical situation.

Currently, my monthly expenses for anything related to the dictionary totals around £40 (subscriptions to archives, libraries, genealogy research tools) which have been instrumental in my work. For example, I couldn't have written my articles for Hanes LHDT+ Cymru without access to ancestry sites or online newspaper archives. This does not include other expenses such as bus tickets to get to the National Library of Wales when I need to, or costs of purchasing dictionaries in order to source them in my work.

I have a patreon which I will be posting in next in July- if you enjoy Prosiect Llyfr Enfys and want to help keep it going, please consider subscribing today by clicking the link above or in my bio. The lowest tier is affordable and if you have the cash to spare, will enable me to keep on working on the project. If you want to make a one-time donation, I'm considering enabling tips on tumblr for those who would prefer that.

If enough people are able to subscribe to keep the project going, I can start to make some concrete plans for a trip to Bangor and share my journey with you all and involve you in the trip. If I'm unable to raise enough funds, I will have to make the decision to pause the project until after my Master's. I do not currently have a publisher, which is also a big factor in that decision, if I need to make it.

All your support is greatly appreciated- if you cannot donate, please share this post.

As ever, huge huge diolch yn fawr to everyone who has supported the project so far- with your help, we can get this dictionary published to help benefit the whole Welsh LGBTQ+ community and beyond.