Patagonian Welsh
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Patagonian WelshCultural HeritageLanguage Preservation
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Patagonian Welsh
Cultural Heritage
Language Preservation
The discovery of Patagonian Welsh, a Welsh-speaking community in Argentina, sparks interest and nostalgia among HN users, who share personal connections and cultural insights.
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Sep 25, 2025 at 12:30 AM EDT
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Welsh is a Brythonic language, which is the most common class of languages spoken across what is now the UK(ish) that predates the Roman invasion in 55/54BC and 43 AD. It's way older than English. Other living examples include Scottish, Irish, Cornish (revived) and Bretton (off of France). There are, of course, dialects and so on.
I think it is absolutely delightful that a small part of Patagonia speaks Welsh. In a world hell bent on painting itself beige this is a lovely thing. Diversity is important in all walks of life.
Yeah though Brythonic and Goidelic both are considered to inherit from Insular Celtic. So it’s not completely off base.
My fiancé is Welsh but only speaks a few words. Despite many Welsh not speaking it now there’s more active Welsh speakers than Irish Gaelic speakers!
I spent some time in North Wales last summer where it’s still commonly spoken. It’s fascinating to hear Welsh. It’s not related to any Germanic or French or others so there’s little vocabulary shared with English aside from some loan words. Even the phonetics are quite strange sounding compared to other European languages.
https://www.translationdirectory.com/articles/article2577.ph...
Celtic is a branch of Indo-European, so the relationship exists. Naively, it's about as closely related to English (Germanic), and to French (Italic), as English is to French.
The closest cognate that comes to mind between English and Welsh is "apple", afal in Welsh.
If you believe the Italo-Celtic hypothesis, Welsh would be more closely related to French than English is.
Browsing https://www.omniglot.com/language/celtic/connections/index.p... shows some other cognates:
Welsh enaid (soul) is cognate with Spanish alma (soul).
Welsh asyn is "cognate" with English ass (the animal), in the sense that Celtic and Germanic each separately borrowed the word from Latin asinus and the modern words are inherited independently. For this reason, the word is also "cognate" with French âne.
Welsh benyw (woman) is cognate with English queen (which used to mean "woman").
Welsh blodyn (flower) is cognate with English blossom. (And maybe also bloom.)
Welsh buwch (cow) is cognate with English cow.
(Although buwch really looks like it should be related to bovine, this does not appear to be the case. But we can see that the b- beginning the Welsh word here matches the b- beginning benyw, corresponding to kw- in English. This is also what happened in cow -- Celtic reduced gw- to b-. In this case, Germanic reduced gw- to k-; in queen, gw- became kw-.)
Welsh bol (stomach) is cognate with English belly.
And I haven't even gotten through the Bs. Cognates are fairly common. This wasn't even a list of Celtic words that are cognate with English words; it was a list of Celtic words that are cognate with other Celtic words.
For basic grammar sure, but English has what 30-40% of its vocabulary from French? There's also a lot of influence from Latin and Greek in English as well.
Likely it's just less cross-cultural sharing from Welsh into English. We get much more exposed to more tidbits from romance languages or German in English than we do Welsh or Gaelic.
> Italo-Celtoc hypothesis
Fascinating! Something to read up on.
You have to be careful what you're counting when you quote figures like that. Here is your comment, but including only the words derived from French:
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... basic grammar sure, ............. influence ... Latin ...... just .... cultural .......... exposed† ..... Romance languages .................
† exposed is unlike "normal" French-derived words in English in that it is not derived from Old French; the equivalent from Old French is expound(ed), and even there I'm not sure why we have ex- instead of es-. I might credit exposed more to Latin than French.
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Here's English:
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for xxxx xxxx xxxx, but English has what 30 to 40 xxxx of its xxxx from French? There's also a lot of xxxx from xxxx and xxxx in English as well.
Likely it's xxxx less xxxx-xxxx sharing from Welsh into English. We xxxx much more xxxx to more tidbits from xxxx xxxx or xxxx in English than we do Welsh or xxxx.
xxxx! Something to read up on.
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53 / 71 words (including Welsh, but not Gaelic) are native English.
(Welsh ultimately derives from the name of a Celtic tribe known to us from Roman writers. In Germanic, the name became a generic word for foreigners. I think it's fair to call it English; it was already like that in proto-Germanic. Gaelic is more recent.)
10 / 71 words, including the somewhat questionable exposed, are from French.
5 are Latin, two are Norse, and then there's Gaelic. Greek is not represented except in the -ic ending on Gaelic (or basic).
If you're listening to someone speak English, knowing French is unlikely to be worth much.
> If you're listening to someone speak English, knowing French is unlikely to be worth much.
It can help a lot when learning because of the huge vocabulary overlap, e.g. more or less every word ending with -tion, you just learn to pronounce it differently
I rated each word in the comment for how much I felt it represented grammar vs semantics (total adding to 1 for each word; ratings in increments of 0.1).
The ratings divided into 31.5 words worth of syntax and 37.5 words worth of semantics, adding up to 69 instead of 71 because I combined "a lot" and "as well" into one word each for this purpose.
French accounted for 6% of the grammar (reflecting my rating of sure and just as 90% "grammatical" each), and 22% of the semantics.
English got 91% of the grammar and 59% of the semantics. The point you might be most likely to disagree with is that I rated many prepositions as 50% semantic. (For example, to in the phrase thirty to forty got that rating, although to in get exposed to and something to read up on were rated 0% semantic.) The second point, cutting in the other direction, is that I rated all pronouns as 0% semantic; realistically they should rate a bit higher. In a better model, I'd probably like to rate them 100% grammatical and also ~30% semantic.
(The residual ~3% of grammar is the passive marker get, from Norse.)
If this is the kind of thing you enjoy, I'd be interested in your evaluation.
At a first pass I'd just say that adjectives, nouns, and adverbs are "vocabulary", and everything else is grammar.
I tend to take the perspective that if a foreign speaker is unlikely to have any trouble learning how to use a word correctly, that word is semantic, and otherwise, the word is grammatical.
† Assuming that the omission of verbs from your list of semantic words was a mistake. Otherwise you're up to 44% grammar. I did count "is" as being grammar, but I would certainly not extend that judgment to all verbs.
--- results ---
By your standard, English is 61% of the semantics and 91% of the grammar (if verbs have no semantics), or 62% of the semantics and 96% of the grammar (if verbs do have semantics).
French is 21% of the semantics and 6% of the grammar (if verbs have no semantics), or 20% of the semantics and 4% of the grammar (if verbs do have semantics).
I don't think much of your methodology, but it's worth noting that your overall numbers are almost identical to mine. (When verbs are meaningless; still very close but distinguishable otherwise.)
In reality, of course, many verbs such as sharing are rich in semantics, and many others such as do are more or less empty.
The relationships between languages are fun and fascinating. "kvinna" still means woman in Swedish.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quine#Scots
(That is to say, the Scots word descends from English, not from Norse.)
We started updating that more than a thousand years ago. Get with the times already. ;D
I wanted to learn Welsh when I was living in Wales back in the 00s, but I couldn't find anywhere to take lessons that wasn't ridiculously expensive. I picked up bits and bobs over the years, but hardly anyone speaks it on a regular basis in the south, so I never got that much exposure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Welsh_television_progr...
...is not a term for any language. In Scotland, you might want to talk about Scots (a Germanic language) or Scots Gaelic (a Gaelic one).
Annoyingly, "Irish Gaelic" (the English phrase) uses the pronunciation /geɪlɪk/ (first syllable rhymes with "pale"), while "Scots Gaelic" uses /gælɪk/ (first syllable rhymes with "pal").
In the parts of Wales where Welsh is spoken, an English person isn't going to understand a word of it unless hearing a word is for something new, so 'helicopter' is still 'helicopter'. Everyone that speaks Welsh can speak English just fine, with a Welsh accent, but there won't be substitute words, so 'yes' is 'yes', whereas in Scots, that will be 'aye'.
As for Scots Gaelic, good point on the pronunciation. That language is on artificial life support, much like Welsh, where there has to be considerable government initiatives to keep it alive.
I am endlessly amused by the introductions in this video, describing the significance of English in each guest's home country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dQiA8lz45c#t=378
[Scotland] Scotland - it's quite a small country, there's not a large population, but we obviously we used to have Scots Gaelic, which was our national language but then, eh... something eh... [England pointedly looks in the other direction] another country came over and uh, kind of, uh...
I think, honestly, the percentage of people who speak Scots Gaelic is one percent. But now everyone speaks English...
[...]
[Wales] We... are probably one of the most patriotic bred people here. That's a bold claim.
[video cuts] that we have to be very proud of our culture and our language because, uh, similar history with Scotland... so our language was on the edge of dying out, but, it sounds really different to English. Most people don't know that[...]
[Ireland] Oh, yeah, so... Ireland is similar with Wales and Scotland with the...
[gestures to England] our friend...The Scotsman and the Irish girl speak only English, but the Welsh girl was raised speaking Welsh, so there does appear to be some comparative health.
What does it mean for one language to be older than another? They are both Indo-European languages, so they are descended from a common ancestor and have each been continually evolving since then.
There is no identifiable specific date at which people were speaking something recognizably "Welsh" or recognizably "English" (as opposed to proto-Indo-European). Both those languages have been evolving continuously, changing slightly every generation, from the point at which they were the same language thousands of years ago until today. Just like there is no specific identifiable date at which a generation of organisms was born that was bonobos or humans rather than proto-Great Apes.
And yet you can talk about certain species being older than another can you not?
Prior to the Roman invasion (55,54BC and 43AD) and subsequent conquests, the predominant languages here were Brythonic or Brittanic. I believe that the last Cornish only speakers (a pair of sisters) passed away in the 1960s or 70s. The language has thankfully been revived somewhat and West Wales (Kernow) is rediscovering its roots. I also believe that shepherds across quite a lot of the modern UKoGB used to count their sheep in Cumbric numbers - the language of Cumbria (note how Cumbric looks suspiciously similar to Cwmru).
Discussions about Indo-European languages is paleontology for language! I'm not so good with me Greek to work out the correct term.
The notion of IE languages is analogous to fossils. We are talking about languages that are living, breathing and spoken. Obviously we must allow a bit of slack when ascribing certain attributes but I doubt any language scholar is going to get upset at Welsh being described as older than English.
The history of these islands has involved invasion after invasion after invasion. How on earth that history has resulted into only a few nationalistic identities and one empire is quite something. Bear in mind that sea travel is far quicker than land when you don't have roads so being islands means easy access and not hard access.
Allegedly her last words were "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don’t want to speak English!").
Just because some accident caused the name "Brythonic" to be applied to languages older than the oldest language with the name "English" says nothing about the importance or value of Brythonic relative to English. The assigning of names to no-longer-spoken languages is arbitrary enough that you cannot use the names to prove anything about reality.
I am not distressed by the thought of an adult's deciding to learn Welsh as a hobby just as I'm not distressed by an adult's spending time on any hobby, but it is painful for me to image a child's being taught an obscure language like Welsh out of some almost-certainly-false belief that it will give him or her access to powerful modes of thought that are unavailable to speakers of other languages. It strikes me as almost mistreating the child to restrict his intellectual, social and economic opportunities in this way (unless the child can pick up second and third languages easily, which is not most children).
I'm not saying that I understand how a language interacts with a developing child's brain well enough to say with confidence that Welsh cannot grant anyone the ability to think in ways that are not possible in other languages. I am open to having my mind changed. But nothing I've ever read over many conversations even begins to change my mind. It's all very simplistic argumentation, e.g., "Society teaches us that diversity is good; so clearly linguistic diversity must be good", e.g., "<<Sapir-Whorf hypothesis>> sure is an impressive term probably coined by super-smart professors, so it is probably true".
I think diversity is always indicated as a positive force in all walks of life. It might not be the easiest path. I might have some issues with monotheism vs polytheism or even theism entirely as a counter arguement 8)
Christianity has a Biblically documented myth about a Tower of Babel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel. Well, that bit of Genesis has a slightly different axe to grind to mine.
English was only established as the British language by Henry VII, so preceding it isn't hard.
Edit: I guess it’s because of the mobile URL…?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1505405/
One fun fact - my dad took some higher-learning Welsh exam as an adult. They had to time the exam to match Patagonia, as they were given the exact same exam to avoid any cheating.
The whole thing feels very much like a Star Trek plot to me with a culture leaving on a ship to an unknown world to preserve their way of life - which later the crew would happen upon in some episode.
"William Casnodyn Rhys, a young theology student, dreamed of establishing a Welsh colony where the Welsh language and culture could be preserved...."
https://www.lulu.com/shop/william-casnodyn-rhys/a-welsh-song...
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