Cycling UK Forum

I used to go to Wales regularly but since the country has decided to put all its place names in Welsh I no longer go. They are now meaningless, as I cannot understand or pronounce them.

And yes I do go to mainland Europe because they have not changed the language of their place names, and with a bit of effort they are mostly pronounceable.

May I suggest mods move this thread to The Tea Shop since it has nothing to do with cycling (or indeed anything else, much)?

You don't need to understand them, any more than you need to know that Swindon means "Pig Hill". Or is the issue than you want to know the previous English version, e.g. if you see a sign to Abertawe?

The length of them can be challenging and Welsh pronunciation needs to be learnt, but it's not impossible.

I have mixed views on Welsh, being one of those people who was born there but doesn't speak a word of it. On the one hand, Welsh had almost died out naturally by the late 1960s, the world really doesn't need more languages, and I'm not a fan of nationalism in any form. On the other, the Welsh have had a rough history at the hands of the English over the decades, and I can understand them wanting to preserve some kind of difference rather than being additional counties of England.

Is this post a joke?

Whatever happened to Meic ?
Hope that’s the right spelling!

The Welsh Bard Dylan Thomas showed us how to approach those names when he wrote "Under Milk Wood" based upon the village of Llareggub.

Welsh is easier to pronounce than English. It is phonetic so you only have to learn to sound the twenty nine letters. Whereas English is chaotic.......' Photi' could be pronounced 'fish'!
Why is it the saes have so much trouble with other languages?
There are excellent on line guides to meaning and pronunciation.

We can only hope the OP is in jest.

roubaixtuesday wrote: ↑7 Aug 2023, 8:36am We can only hope the OP is in jest.

Hope so.
Reminds me a bit of some of the comments down under when Australia finally started reinstating Aboriginal names for places (Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock) probably being the best known of them but there are countless examples). Basically accepted that the white settlers had stolen the land from the natives and named it to their preferences when that land already had a name!

Wales is the same, it's just reverting to original names.

rogerzilla wrote: ↑7 Aug 2023, 7:50am You don't need to understand them, any more than you need to know that Swindon means "Pig Hill".

Or "Sweyn's Hill" as in Sweyn Forkbeard, short-lived king of England. But for some reason Swindonians themselves seem to prefer the "pig" story. Appropriately, one of the best-known organic pig farms in the country is on the edge of the downs just outside Swindon.

Its not so hard. Lived there for over 5 years. When I hear Pontypridd called Pontee prid it does my ed in!

Its Pont a prith! Or, summat like that - take the trouble....

Al

tentman wrote: ↑7 Aug 2023, 7:14am I used to go to Wales regularly but since the country has decided to put all its place names in Welsh I no longer go. They are now meaningless, as I cannot understand or pronounce them.

And yes I do go to mainland Europe because they have not changed the language of their place names, and with a bit of effort they are mostly pronounceable.

Hmm... Back in the days when GPS was still a US military secret I once had to drive from Alsace to a town in the Netherlands and back. Driving through Belgium on the way there was no problem, since all the signs on the autoroute were in French. On the way back, though, they were all in Flemish and I got lost.

It didn't help that I was starting flu and it was bucketing with rain all the way.

In many ways Celtic place names are easier to decode than English ones, because they are often descriptive of the location in plain language (OK, if you don’t speak the language you have to translate, but that’s quite interesting in itself), and they often give a nice insight to history.

English ones have often been so mangled and corrupted over the centuries that it takes a team of historians to work out what they might mean, as in the Swindon example, and where I live now, which apparently started as Sigwinestun, when a bloke called Sigwine decided to settle there, but is absolutely nothing like that a millennium and a half on.

In Ireland, some places got given phonetic-anglicisations of their names, and some got given names based on translation into English. Back-casting to Irish over the past century has involved the same mix of phonetic-equivalent and translation, resulting in some names that now don’t make proper sense, rivers called Abhainn Owen-something being an example. ‘Owen’ began as a phonetic anglicisation of ‘abhainn’, meaning river, similar to afon and avon. I’ve even heard people talk of The River Abhainn Owen-whatever, so the The River River River-whatever. From what I can work out, there’s an attempt been made more recently to sort this out, with some places being renamed yet again, into Irish that does make proper sense.

I'm up on the Llyn Peninsula at the moment after an absence of many many years and have been struck by the prevalence of the native language.

Thank you all for your observations. I should have indicated that my frustration with the language came about during planning to go to the Welsh Cycling Festival on my bike, so it had everything to do with cycling. I was trying to read out the places on the proposed route on the phone to a friend but he could not understand I word I was saying.So naturally I emailed him but got so lost trying to spell the names of the places I gave up.

I would just add we went to France instead, French being so much easier. We cycled to the port and onwards via Rouen. So still to do with
cycling.