Within walking distance

The fabulous lego-based wedding cake

This weekend I went to a friend’s wedding near Milton Keynes, and stayed in an AirBnB in Bletchley on Saturday night. In my review of the AirBnB I said that it was “within walking distance” of the centre of Bletchley. After writing this, I started thinking that the phrase walking distance probably means quite different things to different people.

I walk a lot – at least 3 or 4 miles a day, so ‘within walking distance’ to me means up to 4 miles, or further. I walk to get around, to keep fit, and also because I enjoy exploring places on foot.

On Saturday afternoon I decided to walk from Bletchley to Newton Longville, the village where the wedding reception took place. On the map the distance was 3 to 3.5 miles, depending on the route. However, part of the route went through an area where a lot of new houses are being built, and some of the roads and paths were blocked off, and I got a bit lost. After asking for directions I found the right road, and ended up walking 5 or 6 miles in total. I got there in the end and had a wonderful time, and got a lift back with the bride’s granddad.

What does “within walking distance” mean to you?

Or do you use another phrase?

(The photo is the fabulous lego-based wedding cake)

It’s in your east hand

An episode of Word of Mouth I listened to recently discussed the language of directions, and how in some languages directions are absolute rather than relative. So you don’t have a right hand or left hand, for example, but a north or south hand, or an east or west hand, depending on which way you’re facing. In some languages directions are relative to a feature in the local landscape such as a river or mountain.

Indonesian is one language they mention that uses absolute direction, at least outside the major cities – in Jakarta they use the equivalents of left and right (kiri & kanan).

The way people think about time also differs in different languages. In Western languages we generally think about the future as ahead of us and the past behind us, but in Aymara the past in in front of you and the future is behind you. This can also be seen in gestures – when talking about the past, Aymara speakers point in front of them.

So if you speak a language which uses absolute directions you have to be always aware of which way is north, or of the location of the landscape feature on which the directions are based. Apparently this is something you can learn – one of the people on the programme spent time with people in northern Australia who use absolute direction, and after a while she found that she was starting to be aware which way was north most of the time.

They also discuss place names in England and how they refer to direction in different ways. There are many ways, for example, to indicate what a place is near: Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Newcastle-under-Lyme (under used to mean ‘hard by’), Weston-super-Mare, Goring-by-Sea, Southend-on-Sea, Aston juxta Mondrum and Wells-next-the-Sea

Are direction words used in interesting ways in your language or dialect?

Clymau tafod

Mi wnes i dyfeisio cwlwm tafod Cymraeg heddiw:

Llawr ar lawr y cawr enfawr mae llawer o lewod lliwiog yn llyfu llaw Gwawr nawr.

Ti’n gwybod unrhyw glymau tafod Cymraeg eraill?

This is a Welsh tongue twister I came up with today. It means “Down on the giant giant’s floor many colourful lions are licking Gwawr’s hand now.”

Do you know any other Welsh tongue twsiters?

Spaghetti car bananas

On a recent episode of Word of Mouth on BBC Radio 4, they discussed the interesting words children come up with. They might attempt say particular words but can’t quite manage all the sounds, or get them mixed up, sometimes with unintentionally funny results. They also get words mixed and muddled, or perhaps muddlixed.

Can you guess the title of this post refers to?

It’s an attempt at spaghetti carbonara.

Other examples from the programme include:

– Snotrils (nostrils)
– Jumpolines (trampolines)
– Hippyhoppymus (hippopotamus)
– Hockle bockle (hot water bottle)
– Suggestive biscuits (digestive biscuits)
– Alligator (escalator)

Sometimes these words get adopted as family words and continued to be used even when the children are adults.

This doesn’t just happen to children though – adults also mix up their words sometimes. A few weeks ago, for example, at one of the choirs I sing in I mentioned to a friend that the song we were learning could do with some calligraphy. She looked at me a bit confused, then we realised that I meant choreography. Hilarity ensued.

Do you have any other examples?

Beds that lie

Welsh sign outside a furniture store in Bangor

The other day I noticed the word gwlau on a sign outside a furniture shop. It’s a Welsh word I hadn’t seen or heard before, but from the context I worked out that it meant ‘beds’. The sign also included the words gwlau soffa (sofa beds). As I hadn’t come across this plural form of gwely [ˈɡwɛlɨ/ˈɡweːli] (bed) before, I wondered if it was a mistake.

According to Geiriadur yr Academi and Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, the plural forms of gwely are gwelyau or gwlâu, so the words on the sign weren’t wrong, but were just missing a to bach (circumflex) on the a.

Gwely comes from the Proto-Celtic *uɸo-legyom from *legh (to lie down), from the Proto-Indo-European *upo (under, below) & *legʰ- ‎(to lie (down)), and is cognate with the Cornish guely and the Breton gwele. *legʰ- is the root of the Irish luigh, the Manx lhie, and the Scottish Gaelic laigh (to lie (down)); and also the Italian letto and French lit (bed), via the Latin lectus (bed); the English lair, the German Lager (store, camp), and the Swedish läger (camp), as well as other words [source].

Ingenious genius

The word ingenious sounds like the antonym (opposite) of genius as in- is often used as a negative suffix (invisible, indivisible, etc). However they are not.

Ingenious means:

– displaying genius or brilliance
– tending to invent
– characterized by genius
– cleverly done or contrived; witty; original; shrewd; adroit; keen; sagacious.

It comes from:

– the Middle French ingénieux (ingenious)

– from the Old French engenious (ingenious)

– from the Latin ingeniōsus ‎(endowed with good natural capacity, gifted with genius), from ingenium ‎(innate or natural quality, natural capacity, genius), from in ‎(in) and gignere ‎(to produce)

– from the Old Latin genere, from genus (birth, origin)

– from the Proto-Italic *genos (lineage, origin)

– from the Proto-Indo-European *ǵénh₁os ‎(race), from *ǵenh₁- ‎(to produce, beget).

Genius means:

– someone possessing extraordinary intelligence or skill; especially somebody who has demonstrated this by a creative or original work in science, music, art etc.
– extraordinary mental capacity
– inspiration, a mental leap, an extraordinary creative process
– the guardian spirit of a place or person (in Roman mythology)
– a way of thinking, optimizing one’s capacity for learning and understanding

It comes from:

– the Latin genius ‎(the guardian spirit of a person, spirit, inclination, wit, genius, literally “inborn nature”), from gignō ‎(to beget, produce)

– from the Old Latin genō

– from the Proto-Indo-European root *ǵenh₁- (see above)

So ingenious and genius come from the same root, as do many other words, but took different paths to arrive at their modern forms.

In Proto-Celtic the PIE root *ǵenh₁- became *gniyeti (to make, to do), which became gníid / ·gní (to do, to work) in Old Irish, which, with a suffix became dogní (to do, to make), which became déan in Modern Irish, jean in Manx and dèan in Scottish Gaelic. This is possibly also the root of the Welsh gwneud, the Cornish gul and the Breton (g)ober). All these words mean to do or to make.

Sources: Wiktionary

The Salmon’s Daughter

Language quiz image

On Tuesday I saw a play in Bangor called Merch yr Eog / Merc’h an Eog (Daughter of the Salmon) in four different languages: Welsh, Breton, French and Guadeloupean Creole.

It was a co-production between Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (Welsh National Theatre) and Teatr Piba from Brittany, and featured actors from Wales and Brittany. The lead role was played by Lleuwen Steffan, a Welsh singer-song writer who lives in Brittany and speaks Welsh, Breton, French, and English, fluently.

For me it was interesting to hear all the different languages, especially the Breton. I understood most of the Welsh and French, though I couldn’t always hear what they were saying clearly, and understood, or at least recognised, bits of the Breton.

There’s some discussion in the play about similarities between Welsh and Breton words, though I doubt very much if any of the Welsh speakers in the audience understood much of the Breton, unless they’d studied it. The languages have many similar words, but sound very different.

When one of the actors started speaking in Guadeloupean Creole I thought it was French at first with an unfamiliar accent, but when I listened more closely I thought is was probably a French-based Creole.

Translation was provided via an app called Sibrwd (Whisper) and was available in English, Welsh, French and Breton. However it was mainly a summary of what the actors were saying rather than a word-for-word translation, and wasn’t in time with the speech. Sometimes it was behind, sometimes ahead, so it was like watching a badly dubbed film, and made it tricky to follow the story.

There’s a review of the Bangor performance in the Daily Post.