Drat it, repetition of 'believe' was error not strange Anglo-Welsh
intensification.
j
> As I've probably said here before, my mother was Anglo-Welsh. She spoke
> barely a few words of Welsh, which wasn't a cultural thing in Swansea in
> the first few decades of last century -- hence Dylan Thomas didn't speak
> it either. What was very noticeable in her speech, all her life, was what
> I used to suppose was a sort of mixed-language dialect, but which might
> well have been an Anglo-Welsh syntax. She would say things like 'over by
> here' (pronounced 'yere') and 'never you mind'; and instead of saying'I
> don't believe believe you' it'd be 'Don't tell your lies', which made it
> sound as though lying was habitual. The strange thing is, though, that
> despite living my whole life in England I still find myself using these
> expressions.
>
> joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Lawrence Upton" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 11:43 PM
> Subject: Re: help--translation query
>
>> And so few people have that syntax within them because the Cornish are a
> diaspora.
>
> It started out much as with Wales, I think. Exeter in S Devon was a
> "Cornish city" (the Roman regional capital) till the 9th century - and the
> Duchy of Cornwall too spreads further than the county indicating partly
> the degree to which the English have pushed the Cornish language back.
>
> But there doesn't seem to have been an equivalent lit tradition - if there
> was a substantial Cornish lit tradition, then it is lost. Nothing like the
> Welsh ap Gwilym for instance. There wasn't really enough written Cornish
> to work with when it was consciously revived
>>
> I spent a couple of weeks in and around Tenby in S Wales a few years back
> and was struck by the degree to which Welsh was being spoken as a matter
> of course - as compared to the situation the last time I had been there in
> the late 60s. And it seemed to me there was a pride with it - whereas
> before I had been aware of a suspicion of the Englishman before, now it
> was upfront and they switched to English courteously and then back. Maybe
> it was just that before I was a surly teenager...
>
>>
> In the hopes you'll excuse a furriner's ignorance -- is there a strong
> Anglo-Cornish literary tradition today, or is it visibly being
> assimilated into the native English, and any more (or less) threatened
> than, say, the Anglo-Welsh?
>
> Poetry Wales has, at least, often impressed me with its awareness of
> blurred cultural lines, and of other subcultures and mixed language
> groups scattered around both Europe and elsewhere.
>
> --Knut
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