LSWR Cavalier
Established Member
The bbc has a Pronunciation Unit to try to get everything right.
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Gwynedd council don't want Mt Snowdon to be called Snowdon anymore
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DynamicSpirit
Established Member
Obviously not, but I don't believe that's relevant to the argument. The point I was making is that there seems to be a double standard at work here: People rightly celebrate and seek to promote minority languages such as Welsh - and I believe that's a good thing because local culture and heritage is something to be preserved. Yet when it comes to English, it seems that, in the eyes of many people, bits of the English language and heritage can be got rid of without a 2nd thought. I suspect it's not unconnected with the wider context that, in much of UK culture today, English (or British) heritage/nationalism is generally looked down on as some distasteful relic of colonialism, but when exactly the same nationalism is expressed for Wales, Scotland or Ireland, suddenly it's a great progressive thing. Well you can't have it both ways - either nationalism and heritage and culture and so on are good, or they are bad. It shouldn't depend on which country you come from. But the proposal to drop the English name for Snowdon isn't just promoting the Welsh language - it's actually removing something from the English language. And to my mind that's the problem. Promoting Welsh names etc. is great - but it shouldn't require attacking other languages.
I would say that this appears to show either misunderstanding or misrepresenting the reasons why people are opposed to the move. I can't speak for anyone else but I can assure that you my objection has nothing whatsoever to do with this being Wales. I would have exactly the same objection if - for example, the UK Government decided to tell the French that London must be 'London' and not 'Londres' even when speaking in French, or if the Japanese Government decided to tell us that in future, we must always refer to Japan as 'Nihon' (the name in Japanese), never as 'Japan' even when speaking in English - and I suspect that in those cases, you would object too, because it would obviously amount to unreasonable interference in other people's languages.
tomwills98
Member
and the tv and radio Wales/Cymru services
English is seen as the language of the oppressor because it is. There's a reason why I am only learning to speak Welsh and not using it first language, and why efforts made to restore Welsh, Scottish, Irish culture is celebrated. The blue books, the Welsh Not, Capel Celyn, were hardly tasteful or wanted.
If the Japanese want us to call them Nihon, ok. It's their country, their language, they can do what they want with it. Australia and the world now know it as Uluru, Eswatini have changed their name too. Did you take grievance with that as well?
Master Cutler
Member
As a bi-lingual ex pupil of Ysgol Dinas Bran Llangollen in the late 60s I still recall the strong emphasis placed on language pronunciation during English, Welsh and French lessons. I believe this should still be a major part of our education system .
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Welsh certainly isn't one either.
LSWR Cavalier
Established Member
Welsh is a small language and is stable now, but it could decline again. An expert said that even German with 100m speakers could disappear eventually, what, all speaking English? Speaking, using,reading books in two or more languages is a great privilege and enrichment.
'Spoken Here' by Mark Abley is an excellent book about small languages including Welsh. I had spent many holidays in the Principality, but the book helped me access the language too.
'Spoken Here' by Mark Abley is an excellent book about small languages including Welsh. I had spent many holidays in the Principality, but the book helped me access the language too.
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
It’s removing precisely nothing from the *English language* whatsoever. If they change the official name I can assure you I’ll still call it Snowdon out of habit if not anything else. If people in Gwynedd want to call it by the Welsh name and use their preferred name of their mountain in marketing and signposting that’s alright by me.
I broadly agree with your points about how other nationalisms other than English are seen as progressive, and we’d find ourselves on the same side in that fight, but I think it’s important to pick your battles!
That objection makes no sense and is not a proper comparison. Nobody is telling English people they can’t say or use Snowdon. It’s a campaign to change the official name. The official name of the UK’s most westerly city is Londonderry but I never refer to it as such and that’s perfectly fine.
I'm no expert on word origination. The thing I was getting really at is the 'Great' part of 'Great Orme', which is obviously English not Welsh.
Actually you could argue British English is. Computer code recognises spellings like color and center but doesn't recognise colour and centre, while chemical spellings have been standardised meaning sulphate is no longer accepted. Using Chrome to write this tells me there's 6 spelling errors in the previous sentence and that doesn't include color or center. Then on top of that some people use expressions they learned from American TV shows and from the lyrics of songs by American artists, rather than the equivalent British English term.
BBC North West could do with one of those, their reporters often incorrectly pronounce certain place and family names that aren't well known in other parts of the country.
It's now widely accepted that both names should be used. You'll see Derry-Londonderry on anything official and on bus destination displays, while according to Wikipedia even the BBC news guidelines say to use Londonderry the first time the city is mentioned in a report but then Derry can be used on subsequent occasions.
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
Bit of a reach to suggest our national language is under threat IMO.
Thank you for illustrating perfectly why nobody should get their knickers in a twist about the proposal - vernacular use will always trump officialdom.
You're nit-picking now. Having been proved wrong on the origin of the word "Orme" you focus on the word "great" instead.
That is essentially what the Ukranian government did by insisiting that English speaking countries call their capital city Kyiv rather than Kiev.
(The underlying reason is that Kiev derives from the Russian form of the name.)
In a mini rough guide to Wales I've got (which states on the back it is free due to the Welsh Assembly and EU funding) it actually says Yr Wyddfa is the summit of Snowdon, with Yr Wyddfa being the Welsh for the burial place. Maybe a local or Welsh speaker can confirm if Yr Wyddfa and Snowdon are equivalent terms or whether Yr Wyddfa only refers to the summit of the mountain.
TravelDream
Member
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That happens all of the time.
What's the capital of China? Beijing or Peking? (Contrary to myth, the Chinese name never changed and Beijing/Peking are just different anglicisations of the Chinese name).
What's India's most populous city? Mumbai or Bombay?
What's Turkey's most populous city? Istanbul or Constantinople? And is it Turkey or the Ottoman Empire/ State?
What's Africa's second longest river? Congo or Zaire?
What are the former British colonies in Southern Africa? Northern and Southern Rhodesia or Zambia and Zimbabwe?
I'm sure you use some of the old names, but some of the new ones too.
Nippon/ Nihon is occasionally used in English too. Nippon Paint, ANA - All Nippon Airways. etc.
Mcr Warrior
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'Yr Wyddfa' means the tumulus, or the burial mound (of the legendary giant Rhita Gawr, one time King of Wales, who was supposedly defeated by King Arthur), and possibly refers only to a cairn of stones at the top of the mountain, whereas 'Snowdon' essentially means Snow Hill, so somewhat different meanings, I would suggest.
So technically it might be wrong to say the mountain railway goes up Yr Wyddfa, as the train stops short of the cairn of stones but it would be correct to have a sign saying Yr Wydffa at the upper station pointing in the direction to the cairn of stones?
An interesting idea. The peak is part of the natural rock, like a mini-mountain on top of the mountain. That fits the legend better than a cairn. Cairns are somewhat variable over long periods of time.
Essan
Member
That has always been my understanding.
However, commonly, both the whole range and the highest summit are referred to as Snowdon, and current OS maps (erroneously IMO) shown the names Yr Wyddfa and Snowdon jointly as referring specifically to the summit.
I am not aware of any Welsh name that encompasses the whole hill including the summits of Y Lliwedd and Crib Coch etc
Then why do so many BBC staff, including news/current affairs people, get their pronunciations wrong, even of quite well-known names from France or Germany and other neighbouring European countries?
Western Sunset
Established Member
Will road signs on the South Circular Road and the M25 now be relabelled as "Sarf London"?
So can we expect that if the German government tells us in future to use Köln, the Italian government to use Firenze, because the forms of those cities' names that we commonly use today are the French ones, we shall happily do so? Or are the Germans and the Italians (and, come to that, the Chinese and the Japanese) sufficiently grown-up to be happy to let other people freely use their own traditional names for cities and countries?
krus_aragon
Established Member
That's my understanding of it (having grown up within sight of it, on the other side of the Straits). To my mind, Crib Goch is on (or part of) Yr Wyddfa.
With the world wide web and more international trade we could well end up with a globalised version of English, rather than different forms in different countries.
I think the difference is there isn't going to be violence between nationalists and unionists over Snowdonia. (Well at least I hope not!)
I said Great Orme was the English term opposed to the Welsh term. I'm not nit-picking and someone posting the origin of the word orme doesn't make what I said earlier wrong, the English language is full of words which originate from other languages.
I may be wrong but I get the impression the Germans would prefer us to use the term Cologne than for us to write Koln. Writing accents on a computer set to the English language is not straight forward and in some languages not having the accents is the same as writing the wrong letter.
I think the Latin name of the city was Fiorentina, also the name of the city's football team.
D6130
Established Member
The Latin name for Florence was Florentia, meaning a flowery place. It became Firenze in Italian and Fiorentina is the feminine adjective used to describe someone or something from Florence. The masculine equivalent is Fiorentino. The football club is so-called because the squadra - the name for a team or squadron - is feminine. (Sorry....slightly OT!).
johnnychips
Established Member
A very popular route up Snowdon/Yr Wyddfa starts from Pen-y-pass. Is this a Welsh word, or a mixture of Welsh and English?
Essan
Member
Good point. I assume it's a hybrid name. So it should be Pen y Bwlch in Welsh.
Pronunciations and preferred official designations are always an interesting topic, especially where the "alternative names" were created by colonial powers or visitors. However, some were also created from long-standing alternative names.
- Cologne stems from the Latin Colonia, and as they built the original city predates Köln by some centuries (in fact, Köln is a derivative, via Cöln and various others).
- Dublin has two names - although Baile Átha Cliath is now the official Irish title, the English stems from Dubhlinn, which is equally Irish in origin.
- Kyiv, as already mentioned, is the correct transliteration of the word Київ from the Ukrainian language, rather than formed as a simplified derivative of the Russian language Киев (Kiyev) - the letter ї doesn't exist in Russian.
- Côte d'Ivoire insists on being known as such, and is known to reject any official or diplomatic communication referring to it as the "Ivory Coast" (or translation into any other language). It has also asked media outlets to refer to it as such rather than by a translation, yet many refuse to do so (despite adopting changes such as Eswatini).
Perhaps one of the Welsh speakers here would be kind enough to write Yr Wyddfa phonetically? If I remember correctly, "dd" should be pronounced like an English th, and an 'f' like a 'v'... I have a vague recollection "wy" has something in common with an 'o'?: I'd guess (badly) at something like "Ear oo-ithva"? (And does it differ if you are a Gwynedd native, compared to pronunciations in other parts of Wales?)
Coming from a county which offers Wrotham and Meopham in close proximity (and let's not start on Trottiscliffe), I can appreciate how painful it is on the ear to hear localities being mangled.
- Cologne stems from the Latin Colonia, and as they built the original city predates Köln by some centuries (in fact, Köln is a derivative, via Cöln and various others).
- Dublin has two names - although Baile Átha Cliath is now the official Irish title, the English stems from Dubhlinn, which is equally Irish in origin.
- Kyiv, as already mentioned, is the correct transliteration of the word Київ from the Ukrainian language, rather than formed as a simplified derivative of the Russian language Киев (Kiyev) - the letter ї doesn't exist in Russian.
- Côte d'Ivoire insists on being known as such, and is known to reject any official or diplomatic communication referring to it as the "Ivory Coast" (or translation into any other language). It has also asked media outlets to refer to it as such rather than by a translation, yet many refuse to do so (despite adopting changes such as Eswatini).
Perhaps one of the Welsh speakers here would be kind enough to write Yr Wyddfa phonetically? If I remember correctly, "dd" should be pronounced like an English th, and an 'f' like a 'v'... I have a vague recollection "wy" has something in common with an 'o'?: I'd guess (badly) at something like "Ear oo-ithva"? (And does it differ if you are a Gwynedd native, compared to pronunciations in other parts of Wales?)
Coming from a county which offers Wrotham and Meopham in close proximity (and let's not start on Trottiscliffe), I can appreciate how painful it is on the ear to hear localities being mangled.
"Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensis" to give it its full name — let someone try and produce a nice English (or French!) version of that!
The Côte d'Ivoire case is an interesting one and certainly not unique. When it was part of the Soviet Empire, Poland was hyper-sensitive to any literature (including road-maps) that shewed the German place-names of pre-1914. On the railways front, Poland replaced all the old German km-posts where these read from places across the new borders (whereas the Czechs happily left things as they were, so you still get series in the Czech Republic that read from zero in Vienna — and at least one series in Germany that reads from a zero in the Czech Republic). Some countries are very much more touchy on all these matters than others!
That's an interesting one because the Spanish for coast doesn't get translated when we talk about the Costa Del Sol, Costa Rica or other places. However, like Köln, the French word for coast has the issue of accents.
krus_aragon
Established Member
I'd suggest ERR WITH-VA
Err as in " to err is human", With as in "wither" , and Va as in "Van" or "Valerie". Emphasis on the middle syllable.
No significant regional variations in pronunciation.
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