Celtic languages without accent (languages comparison)
Вставка
- Опубліковано 3 жов 2023
- This short video demonstrates what Celtic languages should actually sound like. Many students of these languages (most of all Irish and Breton) do not pay enough attention to pronunciation. This video is just another reminder of how these languages sounded among native speakers.
And of course, let’s not forget how beautiful and diverse the Celtic languages are!
This video presents all 6 existing Celtic languages - Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic!
This video was actually inspired by ilovelanguages
Episodes:
00:11 - Irish (Gaeilge)
01:15 - Breton (Brezhoneg)
02:44 - Welsh (Cymraeg)
03:29 - Scottish gaelic (Gàidhlig)
04:47 - Manx (Gaelg)
05:40 - Cornish (Kernowek)
Some years ago a felow Basque said: "A lenguage doesnt dissapear cause the foreigner reject to learn it, dissapears cause natives reject to use it."
It's a popular phrase here in the Basque Country, and it's absolutely true
@@erikrom11 Agur eta ohore Joxean Artze "Harzabal"
Words are like muscles. If you don't use them, they wither away.
In the case of many of these languages, they died because the English systematically wiped them out.
The 600 plus year english occupation had a negative impact on Irish speakers, who faced discrimination, oppression, and assimilation by the English authorities.
The Irish language was banned or discouraged in many domains, such as education, law, and religion.
Irish speakers were often denied access to higher education and certain professions, and were forced to pay higher taxes and rents.
Of course majority of Irish speakers that strictly spoke Irish were likely arrested, killed or exiled due to rebelling.
The last speaker of Newfoundland Irish I know died in 2003 and he was my grandfather
Did your dad teach you anything?
@@KumarAnshswow
Did he teach you any?
@@poltronafrau I didn’t mean that as an insult you sensitive softy. I just asked if he learned any from his family. If not, then his family failed to pass it down. Which means Newfoundland Irish destroyed itself, which is part of human history. I am not complaining, I just understand how the world works
Sorry my ignorance, which area of Gaeltacht is?
It's such a pleasure to hear the unstained kind of Brezhoneg that my grand-grand parents used to speak as their native language!
Oh yes, I am totally agree with you! Can I know the region of Bretagne where your grand parents were from?
@saarinen_east5618 They were from the most western tip of Brittany. "Pen ar Bed" in Breton which means "Head of the world" in the sense of "tip of the world".
@@mp2956 oh yes Finistère, very nice place! The leonard dialectal zone
Mine are from the other end, close to the linguistic border :)
Fanch region in cotes d'Armor.
Didn't they teach your parents? Mine didn't but luckily they're not all gone yet so I could learn from my great aunts 😊
Also, I was lucky not to be born in France so it's easy for me to speak without a French accent 😂 (not that I would consider myself to be fluent at all. Possibly b2 level). What about you?
@@saarinen_east5618 Terminology like "unstained" is problematic. Plus, all languages get "stained". No one lives in isolation anymore. The emphasis should be on supporting the language.
I speak Semitic languages but even though it doesn't affect me, I hope the Celts revive their languages, there's nothing I love more than cultures preserving themselves
A genuine question, do any of these languages sound Semitic? If yes, which one(s)? I ask because I speak one of these languages as my mother tongue and I'm always told it sounds like Hebrew. Can you guess which one? I'm curious.
@@michelleevans7401 I dont speak any semitic languages, but id guess thats due to the strong "R" made at the back of the mouth
@@michelleevans7401yeah, the first 2 of them sound like Semitic languages, I’m a Hebrew speaker myself
@@michelleevans7401 Which semitic language do you speak?
@@klaus120 More likely the guttural phonemes of /x/ and /ɣ/, which appear regularly and are not found in English. While Irish can be throaty, it's still small compared to the range of gutturals in Arabic and Hebrew.
My Welsh speaking friend was nursing in the Falklands when the hostilities or war broke out. Church service continued and one Sunday and Argentinian soldier attended her church. She went to speak to him afterwards and found their common language was Welsh. He came from a Welsh speaking community in Argentina.
I'm from Argentina and yes, we got a huge community of welsh people living in the south of the country. They preserve their tradition and roots
I'm Argentinian too, they are in the Patagonia region. Very beautiful place. That war has left a scar in several generations, including mine, hearing stories like your friend's is very interesting because it adds a little joy to the horrible context of the war
My Father (UK) went regularly on business to the town of Trelew during the 80s. He always took 5 Nations VHS tapes with him. I think he was quite selective because Wales were crap that decade. He also used to buy a couple of extra programmes outside the Arms Park to hand out to his best customers !
@@victorcampbell1868hardly huge
Unfortunately the part of the country where the Welsh people went to was conquered by Argentina
When I, a Canadian, was on a train in Scotland, I overheard an older woman and a younger woman speaking Gaelic. The younger woman seemed to speak it in a peculiar way, which I vaguely recognized (though not a speaker) from it's tonal pattern. "Excuse me, but are you speaking Gaelic with a Canadian accent?" I asked the younger woman. Indeed she was. She was, of course, from Nova Scotia, Canada, where Gaelic is still spoken in a few towns. She had just married a young highlander, and the older woman was her mother-in-law. In the 19th century, Gaelic was the third language of Canada, but an active campaign of ridicule, suppression in the schools, and isolation in widely scattered little communities reduced it from nearly a quarter million speakers to only a few thousand today. The salt-in-the-wound was that many of the Canadian politicians who promoted its suppression were Gaelic speakers, filled with shame that they had been raised in a "primitive" language only "suited to poetry and fairy tales." A Nova Scotian poet, Am Bàrd Mac Dhiarmaid, wrote a song, "An Té a Chaill a' Ghàidhlig" ["The Woman who Lost the Gaelic"] satirizing this self-loathing attitude. It was the same period during which many of our First Nations languages were being suppressed in the same way.
They were speaking Irish ☘
@@TheWrensHouse No, they were not speaking Irish. I asked the younger woman. She answered in Maritimes Canadian English, which is obviously very familiar to me, and explained exactly what I recounted here. There was no conceivable reason for her to lie. Scots Gaelic continues to be spoken daily in some parts of Nova Scotia, and linguists are well aware of it's particular features, since it has evolved separately from it's Hebridean and Highland origins, with some influence from Acadian French and even a bit from Mikmaw. There were many communities in Canada speaking Irish in the past, but all have been scattered and absorbed. The Gaelic-speaking communities on Cape Breton Island and near to it are well-known to Canadians, a matter of some pride in Nova Scotia, and every effort is now made to preserve a once persecuted language. Irish was once widely spoken in Newfoundland, which has a very different culture and history from Nova Scotia. However, the last fluent native speaker of the Irish language in Newfoundland died two generations ago.
That is not surprising given the British influence over Canada. It's very interesting how they try to destroy some peoples cultures and let others dominate. I pray we revive the language here in Ireland, thanks for sharing ✌&💚
@@rickybobby420.Well, actually, the British influence over Canada was always minimal, confined to some constitutional elements and legal forms. Historically, Scottish and Irish cultures have had far more influence in Canada than English. When Canada was created, it was done as an amalgam of French Canadian and British forms, with two official languages and two accepted legal traditions (Code Civile and Common Law) --- and this structure remains to this day. Every public service is available in both French and English, and every product is packaged in both languages. I attended French-language schools, where I was taught English as a second language.
The Irish language faded from use because it arrived in widely scattered little communities that were surrounded by dozens of other ethnic groups. Like their neighbours who spoke Icelandic, Ukrainian, Cantonese, German, Polish, or Punjabi, they simply adopted the "lingua franca" that made it possible to live with their neighbours. In some parts of the country, this was English, and in other parts it was French. French-speaking Quebec was the area where the most speakers of the Irish language settled, along with those Irish who only spoke English, and they were absorbed into French Canadian society --- so much so that anyone would consider "Patrick O'Hara" to be a "good French Canadian name." The Province of Newfoundland is very proud of having Irish roots, but the overwhelming majority of its early settlers came from Wicklow, Wexford, Kilkenny and Waterford, and were English-speakers when they arrived. The Irish-speakers were concentrated in the southwest corner of the island, and weren't numerous by comparison. But they kept their Irish for many generations. The collapse of the fisheries and the subsequent migration of outport-dwellers to the capital city had more to do with the eventual death of the Irish language than did any British influence. The Gaelic speakers in Manitoba blended in first with the French-speaking Metis people before they ultimately switched to English. In the prairie provinces, with most of the population arriving in a single generation from (mostly) Central and Eastern Europe, it was inevitable that almost everyone would adopt English, while a minority stuck to French. Nevertheless, there is still a town in Manitoba where almost everyone still speaks Icelandic!
While there was an unfortunate attempt by authorities to suppress our First Nations languages in the first half of the 20th century, and impose English or French upon them, these efforts ultimately failed. While some of the smaller First Nations are endangered, the bigger ones are thriving. The Northwest Territory has eleven official languages (English, French, and nine First Nations languages). In our northernmost territory of Nunavut, there was never any question of the outcome. Inuktitut is the language of government, education, commerce, and the media, with English an encouraged second language.
Deizh mat
There is a clip from a couple of years ago that has been called "Connemara Road Rage". It's two Irish men having a heated argument in Irish, showing that the language is alive and well. It was quite interesting to hear.
I actually know the guy who was driving the van 😂 He used to come into the shop I was working in all the time.
And do you know how to speak a bit of gaeilge? 😂 @tomconnolly9895
@@kaproskarleto5136the correct answer here is “tá cúpla focail agam”
a language is alive when people use it to argue
Does anyone know the exact words that are said between 4:07 and 4:47 in Scottish Gaelic? I am trying to learn that Scottish Gaelic accent, but I cannot understand most of the words! I think I heard the words oirnn and ceòl and dìon and cultar and sealladh and eile (pronounced ile) and tìr and agus and dhìon! I am beginner level in Scottish Gaelic and Irish and Manx and Cornish and mid beginner level in Breton and mid intermediate level in Welsh and upper intermediate level in Icelandic and Norse and German and advanced level in Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and around mid intermediate level in Swedish and French and Portuguese and Italian! Celtic languages remind a lot of Germanic languages, and Welsh sounds a lot like Norse and Dutch!
Native Breton sounds like a completely different language from Diwan school Breton, it’s crazy…
Doesn't make me double take thinking it's French
Yes! And also my favorite is this one (I couldnt add to my video sadly) - ua-cam.com/video/pscwstBMry0/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TAB.TV
The way Breton has been kidnapped nowadays by French is truly sad.
@@osasunaitor I like your wording about kidnapping! It's exactly what happened... they kidnapped it and are now trying to replace it (even if not on purpose)
@@saarinen_east5618 well, I believe there is a certain degree of purpose in what France has done to minority languages. Ever since the Revolution, anything other than Parisian culture has been suppressed
The Irish the first man is speaking is sadly now extinct, he spoke the Clare dialect of which he was one of the last native speakers . Very similar to the Irish of Inis Oirr on the Aran Islands as Inis Oirr being close to Clare would have had a lot of contact with the Clare Irish speakers throughout history.
It would be really interesting to read of academic analysis of the linguistic border between the Connacht and Munster dialects in Clare. I wonder if speakers of one dialect would understand but not speak the other dialect or perhaps did they have a common dialect.
@@kevingriffin1376 Such analysis exists: "The dialects of County Clare" by Nils M. Holmer, 1961. Available for free online. He comments precisely on this border overlap, right down to townland level. Enjoy!
North Munster Irish and South Connacht Irish are very similar, there once existed a Gaelic dialectical continuum across the whole country. The gaps from dialectical extinction now mean Ulster Irish feels relatively removed from Munster Irish and South Connacht Irish, though still similar to North Connacht Irish (Mayo).
very sad, atleast some of it has been preserved in recordings
@@pio4362Yes, I'm from East Mayo near Ballaghadereen and we had a good bit of Ulster influence, "kruk" for "cnoc" for example.
@@paulbreen8533 Interesting, I've also read that the dialects of North Leinster (Longford, Westmeath, Louth and Meath) could be classified under Ulster Irish, such was the resemblance. In Mayo it may be the natural continuum or more likely from the many poor folks who fled the huge land theft of the Plantation of Ulster of the early 17th century.
It would be interesting to learn how much like Ulster the Irish of Sligo and Leitrim sounded. Of course, within Ulster, there were many sub-dialects, not just what we still hear in Donegal today.
As a native Welsh speaker, I felt that if the Cornish speaker spoke a little more slowly I could understand a lot more of what he was saying, as it was I was able to understand many words
I’d suggest changing the playback speed to 0.75x and following along with the Cornish captions underneath. It’s something to work with considering the Breton speakers had French captions underneath with no context.
and stranger is as a Norwegian i too could hear old norse or Islandic in there
😯😯😯😯😯
yes, they are very similar. the main difference is words that end in 't' or 'd' or sometimes 'dd' in welsh almost always end in 's' in cornish (gwyns = gwynt)
one thing to look out for though, is the word 'dhymm' which sounds exactly like 'ddim' but doesnt mean the same thing at all. it means 'to me' or 'with me'
@@user-hr5ui5in9e: In the Cornish?
I know there were Viking "visitors" in both Ireland and the Western Isles (and northern Isles) of Scotland, so some Old Norse words in Scottish Gaelic and Irish would not be surprising but, as far as I know, there weren't any Viking incursions in Cornwall.
Timestamps:
00:11 - Irish (Gaeilge)
01:15 - Breton (Brezhoneg)
02:44 - Welsh (Cymraeg)
03:29 - Scottish gaelic (Gàidhlig)
04:47 - Manx (Gaelg)
05:40 - Cornish (Kernowek)
Thanks - the last one had me stumped. I didn't know Cornish had even been recorded. It's great to hear Cornish, Manx and all the other Celtic languages.
@@cefnonn
Correction: we actually have a good idea of how Kernowek was spoken, however it is still a reconstruction, so it's probably not perfect, as it borrows quite a lot of English to fill in gaps for words which weren't recorded. My original assertion was based on recollection and my limited Welsh speaking skills not actual research, so I had extrapolated the similarities between Kernowek and Cymraeg in pronunciation to Kernowek being reconstructed through Cymraeg.
Original comment: It's sadly not original but reconstructed. All native Kernowek speakers died out (Dolly Pentreath, considered the last recorded native speaker died in 1777) and the revival project is essentially a vague reconstruction with a probably vastly different pronunciation mainly borrowed from Cymraeg (Welsh) and Breton (Brezhoneg)
@@artoriastheabysswalker Do you actually speak Cornish to be able to make this sweeping statement? We have a very good idea of how Cornish was spoken because of the work of Edward Lhuyd. Most of the pronunciation of the revival has not been borrowed from Welsh and Breton. That makes no sense at all. Even vocabulary wise, relatively little is directly borrowed from Welsh or Breton.
@@davythfear1582 No I do not, and I have corrected my comment, I speak a bit of Welsh and largely extrapolated from the similarities in pronunciation that the dead Cornish must have been reconstructed with the help of Welsh. I didn't come across Edward Lhuyd's work and as such believed that only a few written fragments existed
Thank you for clearing that for an ignorant individual as myself. The creator should at least have made an effort in labeling the different type of Gaelic languages
In Australia I met a wonderful elderly lady of Welsh descent. Her father's WWI infantry unit landed in Breton and its commissary officers, speaking French, found they could not communicate with the local farmers who only spoke the language of their Celtic forbearers. Their problem was solved when the lady's Welsh-speaking father volunteered as an interpreter.
The region that speaks Breton is called “Brittany” in English
I love this story !
They spoke brythonic then. They may have been from Brittany? They wouldn't have been able to speak to gaelic speaking people easily. But you said breton. You should look into to relation between the Isle of whight, Jersey and language. Its like a little bubble that has survivived untill today.
@@ellehan3003yes, and the Welsh speak a Brythonic language.
@@ellehan3003 Brythonic is a language family
I love the sound of these Gaelic and Celtic languages spoken by native speakers. Its great to see two young women speaking beautifully in Cymraeg and Scottish Gaelic.
Gaelic languages are a subdivision of Celtic family.
@@AotO_DJGaels were the first tribes in Briton the Celts came and Gales mixed bred and took their culture with theirs two different origins of language
@@Emilyb21-dm3bf That doesn't sound right to me. The Gaels were themselves a Celtic tribe, and researchers don't have a definitive cultural identity for the humans who inhabited the British Isles before them. The closest they have is something vaguely Indo-European, like the Bell Beaker culture.
@@kelliatlarge I just read they found DNA and the similar fingerprint in a fishing village in Spain where they think the Geals left 5000 BC to go to UK. I think cheddar man was alot earlier. And they were not Celts but took on the culture of the Celts and blended it with their own. That what I read it's new research but I'm aware it changes and there are different theorye esp on Celtic migration. I'm not expert I just like the subject
@@kelliatlarge the Beakers were not their that long because it became uninhabitble so possible went to Spain as there were neanderthal at that time living their who had red hair and cheddar man may be one of the first Celts evolving in Iberia Spain . But Gaels left before them but no doubt bred with each other. When the planet heated up some moved to the UK apparently by boat as alot of Forrest fires climate change was happening. I only read this so it's just a new theory. We found beaker cheddar man's ancestors so his family did go back to the UK as his ancestor is English
I speak both Breton and French. Hearing Welsh through a Breton ear gives me the same passive understanding that my French language does for Italian: it all makes sense, though I cannot speak a single word!
You kind of answered the question I just asked above!
BS
That was fascinating I mostly have “school Irish”. I was lost on the first Irish speaker. Understood most of the other Irish speakers, as one spoke very fast. The Scots Gaelic speaker was easier to understand, he spoke slowly. Plenty of similarities to Irish. Then finally to my surprise I was able to make a guess at the Manx speakers. I assume it was the “Our Father”.
The word similar to ‘riocht’ - meaning ‘Kingdom’ in Irish, and ‘Neamh’ similar to the Irish word for heaven - gave it away for me.
Me too
The first guy was speaking Clare Irish, now extinct, so we hadn't been exposed to it. You probably understood a bit of the guy telling the story about the old woman walking down the road. The Scots gaelic guy - I only understood the word "19" (or 18). Manx gaelic is basically just oriel or ulster Irish preserved from a few hundred years ago and they were saying the Our Father, which you know off by heart anyway, so of course you understood most of that.
Tbh I thought the second and third guy was speaking Scottish gaidhlig because it sounded like a Harris accent
It has plenty of similarities because it’s Irish
Kingdom is "rige" in Danish, pronounced "riij" (same word as German Reich). I wonder whether there is a connection?
My ancestors spoke brezhoneg. It’s so amazing to hear it spoken as it should be.
If you want to learn there is still a lot of classes and even school entirly in brezhoneg called diwan. i went to one of those . Brezhoneg da viken
@@bleizh_le_rat please… Diwan is the culprit of this stereotype of the French accent in Breton.
@@PainterVierax maybe, but they done more than a lot of people to preserve the language, without them most children wouldnt be able to speak it
@@bleizh_le_rat the language? what language? This "unified" breton is nowhere near the native dialects spoken by the elders.
@@PainterVieraxhave you heard what the Scots say? Better broken Gaelic than Gaelic in the coffin. The same applies for Breton I reckon.
I am from Belarus but I adore Celtic peoples, cultures and languages! Dear Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Breton, Cornish and Manx friends! Respect and remember your roots, speak your native tongues, sing your traditional songs and give your children a part of your soul teaching them how to speak the languages of your ancestors! Éirinn go Brách! Long live the Celtic nations!
Жыве Беларусь
@@AlentoursCalistere жыве вечна :)
It's only spoken in some areas but it's having a revival. 😊
Your belarus language isitnt wery well too
А які ты выкарыстоўваеш штодня? Беларускага ці маскоўскага
All of us of the various diaspora (many with multiple lines, eg. Scots-Irish, Manx-Welsh, Welsh-Cornish ECT.) should honor our ancestors and learn our old languages.
agree
There is no should. You have no point. No valid case for that.
There's no such thing as Scots Irish!
its like saying somkeone is german cherokee cause they live on what used to be a cherokee reservation.
@@SeamusButler
@@bastait exactly!
I'm italian, i live in Rome , one time i met two young brothers from Scoltand that speaked scottish gealic and they were catholics, they were from Hebrids if i recall well and another time a whole family first language wesh speaker8even the children) , it was a lovely chat, it was like meeting the personification of the Highlands and the future of Cymru language .
They must have been from Uist or Barra, the only parts of Scotland that never became Protestant
"Cymru" is the Welsh language, Scots Gaelic is known as "Gaidhlig"
@@michaelhalsall5684 they mentioned two seperate occaisions, one where they met the scottish brothers and another where they met a welsh family.
@@frayzoid Catholics are all over the place mate.
I'm British/English, learnt French at school, and something that struck me about Celtic languages was many of the words remind me a bit of Romance languages compared to my own Germanic.
I heard english recording from a Breton native speaker who learned the language while he was working in England, he sounded as welshman speaking english, so often people would ask him if he was Welsh. Similar to slavs having strong slavic accent when they speak english.
Yes, thats right, but modern bretons speak with a strong french accent and think they are speaking correctly. So dramatic ngl
@@saarinen_east5618like modern Manysi people having a Russian accent on top of their language.
Well technically they are since they are Breton, language evolves, it just so happens that it evolves according to what the IIIrd republic always wanted aka make sure all of France is French (read akin to Paris), but even then since Gallo exists* you can already see that the evolution is really more than 2 centuries old. Bit sad that we are distancing ourselves from our cousin, in a way if breton manages to survive it would be cool if its evolution made for a new continental Celtic language over a cousin of the island celts ^^ @@saarinen_east5618
@@Vizivirag Yes, unfortunately, this is common for all languages, most of whose speakers are not natives from the childhood; Very good example is Karelian which is phonetically close to Finnish but most of speakers have a massive Russian accent
@@saarinen_east5618That may go far back, though. Dialects are shaped by surrounding languages. The (Norwegian) Finnmark dialect sounds a lot like Northern Norwegian with a Finnish/Sami accent.
Im a proud Cornish-boy and believe all cornish schools should learn our nation language
The first Irish speaker was one of the last from Co. Clare..Next speaker was from the next county up which is Galway ..Connemara to be exact..that long nasal sound .
The last speaker was from Co Mayo above Galway..
Ya the mayo man im fairly sure was the last monolingual gaeilgeoir
5:17 so _that's_ the language Churchill spoke
Churchill once said...
@@saarinen_east5618Underidoidodidodiododdoo
@@saarinen_east5618but he thought it frequently….
I've been looking for this video for years, thank you for uploading!!
The man at 0:59 is brilliant. He speaks in a precise, descriptive style with a rhythm that makes it seem like poetry or a song.
He is indeed reciting poetry
Languages as ancient as these are absolutely priceless treasures
They create difference and viol😊
@@Krankenwagen571no they don’t
Shut up troll 😂😂😂
It's wonderful to hear these Celtic languages. Thank you for this! I hope we don't lose these. I'm learning Scottish Gaelic.
Same here 🏴
I'm 99% sure the two Manx speakers both said the exact same thing. I've heard nearly the exact same said many times in Irish - it's the 'Our Father' prayer. Even though I'm pretty fluent in Irish, I find the Scottish Gaelic the most understandable.
Yep, this is the Lord's Prayer
The first Irish speaker was speaking Clare Irish, now extinct, so you had no chance there. You probably got a bit of the guy telling the story about the old woman out walking. The Manx is just old Ulster Irish from a few hundred years ago and they're saying the our father which you know off by hear so that's easy enough. The Scots gaelic guy - the slower clearest speaker but the only word I understood was "18" or "19", don't really know what on earth he was on about. Possibly about when he decided to learn Scots gaelic I would suspect.
@@mccluskeytomHe talks about having lived over in Glasgow for 7 years now, having grown up and spending most of his life - or at least, his formative years - in Harris, having studied in Lewis and having moved to the mainland at age 18. He does not talk about Gaelic in this short clip but from his accent, you can tell he is a native speaker.
Since I am learning Scottish Gaelic (Gaidhlig [I do not know how to add accents I know one belongs]), of course it seemed the easiest. I have also been learning German for two years. My interests are German, Scottish (and other Celtic languages), and French. I wanted to learn German as I have always found a fascination with it. I am partially German by ancestry. Celtic languages interested me more recently. I was fascinated with Welsh. I had heard of Irish (Irish Gaelic). Then I discovered Scottish Gaelic. I was very curious about it. I had never heard of it before. Duolingo taught it. I am also of partially Scottish lineage. I then learned of its obvious connection to Irish (Irish Gaelic) and more distant connections to other Celtic languages such as Welsh, Manx, and Brythonic. Truly now all Celtic languages fascinate me, especially after starting to learn one.
My hope for the future is that Irish dominates in Ireland to become once again a contender for English. I hope that in Scotland that achieve at least 50% fluency, and in Wales they re-achieve a level of 80-90% fluency. I would also like to see a revival of Brythonic, if it were possible in England to an extent.
I think that the world was a very interesting and diverse place, unfortunately it is becoming less so. I would like to see it re-achieve that track.
Love to all my European brothers who hold their language, people, culture, and traditions dear. Being what and who I am I have a special place in my heart for the English, Irish, Scots, Germans, and Dutchman, but in truth I love you all for the coast of Ireland over the sea and the cliffs of dover across the sea and past Normandy and Brittany all the way to the Caucuses.
@@leviturner3265 There's actually an interesting difference in how English, German and Irish describe a person having a particular feeling.
For being 'hungry' you'd say:
- "I am hungry" in English
- "Ich habe Hunger" (I have hunger) in German
- "Tá ocras orm" (Hunger is on me) in Irish
Subtle difference in how to think about feelings. Things like that can help spark interest in languages and sometimes help with learning other languages.
To add accents you can try pressing and holding the letter if using a phone/ tablet. For windows/ mac it's generally hold alt + [the letter] / option + [the letter], respectively. Might have to change the keyboard layout or language as well.
Welsh was one of the fastest growing languages on the duolingo app. I'm a fluent welsh speaker and use it whenever I can.
You use a app for a language you can fluently speak?
@@israeladesanya4596I'm fluent in welsh. I speak Welsh whenever I can. I live in Wales. Hope that clarifies my original comment. Diolch! 👍🏻🏴
Breton guy is from my village.
He definitely has an accent from my village I can tell you ^^
So cool. Im from Scandinavia and suddenly the Irish in the beginning almost make sense to me in their own accent even though I don’t understand. Sounds like old men around me as I grew up. I even feel I hear some words I understand. Probably not, but super interesting. Great video!
Edit: And my mum has is Dutch and I hear “Dutch” sounds in the Breton bit. Wow. Sorry… I’ll just keep watching now.
Irish has the word 'run' meaning whisper from Old Norse 'rune' and Scottish Gaelic still uses the Old Danish word 'Bùth' meaning shop.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780rún means secret in irish
As is also the original meaning in Norse. Because the runes were magical and revealed secrets
@@ifjchsiwocjcjs4378Secret-whisper, neighbor or neighbour. The implication is the same. The Old Norse Rune means both to whisper and secret because we whisper our secrets don't we. Thanks for your feedback.
I'm Dutch and for me there's a Scandinavian sound to these recordings 😉
Thank you for this compilation! It is really difficult sometimes to find an audios with rare celtic languages
I love being able to speak Welsh and I notice the similarities when I see and hear the Cornish language in particular. Great video-thanks! (Diolch yn fawr!😊)
One guy from Breton said his area was called 'Pen ar bed'' meaning 'head or tip of the world'. Dw i'n dysgu Cymraeg ar hyn o bryd..but Isn't that similar to the Welsh ''Pen ar byd''?
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 Very like it, yes!
@@debbiet5130Diolch. Hwyl.
In days when most people never travelled far from home, there will have been great variations of accent and local dialect words unique to them.
Actually, it is the influence of the surrounding language that changes the other language. I'm not Irish myself, but I live in Ireland and hear Irish language almost every day. I can hear that it has a very strong English influence to it, particularly the pronunciation of the 'r' sound.
Thank you for compiling such a video!
Listening to this, it's very obvious to me where Gallician-Portuguese got it's accent from. Seriously interesting.
Irish people (and I think British people too?) are descended from Gallicians. Our Celtic languages probably all originated there.
I’m from the Highlands on Scotland and recently learned I’ve got some Gallacian heritage. No idea how it happened but a funny connection.
Nothing to do with Gallician-Portuguese accent. This statement is just ridiculous.
@@themk4982 There is no connection between Portuguese-Gallician and Celtic languages.
@@toutainchristophe4348 Sir, I am not referring to words, of course, I am fully aware Gallician was and is derived from vulgar Latin. I am talking about the accent and the phonetics of the language.
Bravat video, trugarez ! Evit ar re ne gaozeont na galleg na brezhoneg, an holl dud a vez klevet amañ o deus pouez-mouezh ar vrezhonegerien a-vihanik, hep an disterañ levezon c'halleg. Ar c'hontrol eo, a-dra-sur e komzont galleg gant ur pouez-mouezh brezhoneg !
What a nice video, thanks ! For those who speak neither French nor Breton, all the people recorded here have an authentic native Breton accent, without the slightest French influence. It's the reverse, they sure speak French with a Breton accent !
I'm very happy to see such languages spoken. Anyone that speaks any of these languages should be proud. You have a rich heritage that should always be preserved. :)
Thank you for the video! Tapadh leibh airson ur video!
Linguist and language lover here: I want to let everyone know here who is learning a language as an adult (as in your age is over a single digit), you are more than likely going to have an accent influenced by your native language. And that's fine! There is nothing wrong with having an accent in your new language. The important thing is to try and to learn and to involve yourself in your new language, not to go for native level pronunciation. You are extremely unlikely to be able to do that. In cases of vulnerable or endangered languages like the Celtic languages, simply learning to speak even with an accent is extremely good.
A lot of people who get focussed on accents in languages miss the point. Languages are for communication, not for perfection and mastery. I don't know every single word in English, I don't have perfect grammar, I can only speak a few dialects, but English is my first language and this level is considered quite good for a language I use everyday. Likewise, when people who are not native English speakers speak English and have an accent, it has become bad manners to try and correct them to speak "proper" English using a "proper" accent. But amongst language learning communities, it's often seen as a failure or disrespectful to not have a perfect native accent. It's not disrespectful to a language or to the speakers to have an accent. It's disrespectful to not try, but failure or a simple inability to have the right accent all the time is not.
There are no "pure" languages, as in a language that has not been influenced or tinged by other languages. All languages interact together and they always have done. Irish has English loanwords, but it also has Norse and Norman loanwords. The accent is always going to have been influenced in some ways by English since English (or Old English/Anglo-Saxon) speakers started interacting with Irish (Old Irish) speakers, which was nearly a millennia ago now. It might have retained a lot of its original features, but it's not going to be without any influence and I think trying to avoid that or gloss over it is doing history and linguistics a disservice in favour of some nationalistic nonsense. Even in this video, some of the Breton speakers definitely had more French influence, and the Cornish speaker definitely had English influence. He didn't even sound particularly Cornish at some points (I live in Devon, next door to Cornwall. In English, our accents have a lot of phonological similarities).
The modern Celtic languages *are not the same as the old Celtic languages*. Even just the Celtic languages of 50 years ago are not the same as modern day Celtic languages. There are completely new ways to interact with people and to have accents influenced. There is a lot of population change. Accents have changed. You can see this in English, as if you listen to someone speaking 50 years ago, you can understand them, but their accent or vocabulary might sound outdated. It's not just English that goes through this: all languages change. It's important that they change in order to survive. Trying to keep languages "pure" kills them. Trying to control languages that tightly doesn't help the language, it just destroys it slowly. Speaking an archaic form of Irish in which there are no words for modern technology or that hasn't been influenced by Ireland's population changes or anything that's happened since 1950 isn't speaking Irish to communicate. You're speaking an outdated form that isn't used. I'm not saying to not pick a dialect to learn, just that those dialects have moved on and are influenced by other languages. Like, Kneecap is a rap group from Northern Ireland who use Ulster Irish and you can see that there is clear influence from English. But they are making music in the language about modern issues that would not otherwise be available, and they are making the language accessible to modern people. That's incredible! I am not talking about their politics or anything, literally just them rapping in Irish about modern things is incredible and should be encouraged. I'm not learning Irish to talk about farming or to read old texts about religion. That would be cool, but I want to learn to speak Irish because I want to help keep it alive and speak to modern people about modern things.
Cornish has had to have been completely revived and reconstructed. It just was not being spoken and there were only a few people who had any knowledge of its grammar, phonology, and vocabulary - and they were not fluent. Cornish is forever going to have been influenced by English, including in its accent. It just is - that's the nature of native English speakers trying to reconstruct a language. There are now some native Cornish speakers, but if they're learning from native English speakers, they are not going to burst out speaking in a perfect Old Cornish accent.
Of the Celtic languages, I've been learning Irish and Welsh. I am learning them and speaking them with my native English speaking brain, but I am still learning and speaking them. I've also been learning Korean for 14 years so there's going to be some influence there, too. None of my languages are pure. My English is affected by Korean and Celtic languages, my Korean is affected by my English, my Celtic languages are affected by my Korean and English. And if someone cares that deeply, then they're probably not interested in what I'm trying to communicate in those languages, but instead they'd rather be the Language Police because I am not speaking their perfect version of the language. We are never going to go back to some magical land where no one had any influence from any other language, when there was a perfect platonic ideal of an accent for each language, untouched by gross other languages. The fairies and pixies are also there and they also speak the special languages and we all live in little cottages and everything is good now. That time never existed. Not even from the first language. Even in Proto-Indo European there were accents from other languages and loanwords and influence. Trying to romanticise these languages or put pressure on people to speak "correctly" just discourages more people from learning. Languages aren't here to be romanticised and fetishised, they're here for communication. They aren't supposed to represent a specific time period in history or a specific set of ideals, they are supposed to be here throughout time and change with time, for anyone to use to express themselves.
Any amount of language learning is good of any language. A popular language like French or Spanish or Mandarin is just as important as learning a vulnerable language. If you're an adult learner, it's important to be realistic about what you can achieve. If you spend years in a different country, speaking exclusively that language to people who speak that language, you can maybe become fluent and have just a light interference accent. But if, like most people, you can't do that, then you are going to have an accent, and interference from your first language, and THAT'S FINE!!!!!!! You are adding something to that language that would not otherwise be there. If you are communicating well, it's not wrong. If you can get yourself understood, you are not failing at language. You have achieved communication in another language!!! That's impressive! For an adult learner, that's incredible! Speaking more than one language has been the standard throughout history and throughout non-English speaking areas of the world. It's only the places that speak English that are predominantly monoglots or monodialectical. Learning languages is important and it always has been, and no matter how badly you say word, if point across come good you succeed have done. Congrat!
I hope more and more people learn languages, no matter what kind. It's so important not only to that language to have another speaker, but to you! Your brain changes and your perspective on life changes when you learn another language. It's addicting. The less we strive for language perfection and just have fun with language, the more success we'll have as a species when learning languages, but also keeping vulnerable and endangered languages going. It's never too late to learn. You are always young enough for another language. Try sign languages to communicate with a completely different group of people within your country! Or a language of a country you've always wanted to visit, or a language you have some tenuous genealogical connection to (part of my reason for choosing Irish), or a language that is completely different from your native language, or try to learn one language through another language, or a language that has a good film you like, or a language that has good music (part of my reason for choosing Korean), or a language that has a religious significance to you, or a language that you've met fluent speakers of before (part of my reason for choosing Welsh), or a constructed language (conlang) that has been completely made up like Toki Pona or Esperanto... Maybe you pick one language and decide you don't like it for whatever reason, then it's okay to try a different one if you want. You don't have to stick to whatever you decide first. Maybe you come back to the other language later when you've had a chance to learn something else first. Languages are fun! Have fun with it! Write bad poetry and sing stupid songs in it! This is what keeps it alive, not rules about having perfect pronunciation and Language Police.
Wow, you seriously put some effort into this comment. Cheers, I found it really interesting.
@@J-alCapone thank you! I don't do low effort posts lmao
Manx and scottish are really similar to each other! 🏴🇮🇲
Yes they are and Irish too. It's like the difference between Scandinavian languages.
Welsh feels like an outlier - I wonder why we lent on the hard "ch" (as in coch = red) and Dd, LL etc. as harshly as we do, and while Welsh lends itself to canu (song/singing), it's not exactly a melodic language to listen to in conversationally as the Gallic Scots and Irish languages. I guess it's subjective and also accent dependant but I don't think many people who are familiar with Celtic languages would disagree ✊🏴🇬🇧
Bhí mé in ann cuid mhaith do Gaeilge na hAlban agus Gaeilge Mhanann a thuigmháil. Ní nach ionadh ós rud é gur ó Éireann a tháinig siad ó thuas.
Manx sounds like Irish with a Dublin accent
@@jayrey5390 it's probably because technically they're two different branches,Welsh, Cornish and breton are Brythonic languages,while irish,Scots Gaelic and manx are Goidelic so while you can tell they're related,they can't understand eachother outside of the branches
I want to emphasize a couple of things:
1. About the last Breton video - the ladies indeed have a slight French influence, but this is a modern recording and not of 30 years old, and they speak in a genuinely good authentic Breton language.
2. The recording of Cornish is indeed questionable, as we don't physically know how this language sounded, and specifically, this speaker makes obvious mistakes in accentuation and stress. However, at least this recording makes us think that all what is done to Cornish is not in vain, and there are people who try to pronounce it well.
3. The first Welsh speaker also has a strong English prosody, but it seemed to me that as a representative of the popular language it is suitable.
4. And yes... Kate Forbes xD
P/S - Be sure to listen to THIS recording of the Breton that I didn't include in my video; it is important - ua-cam.com/video/pscwstBMry0/v-deo.html&ab_channel=TAB.TV
What make you think that the first Welsh speaker has a 'strong English prosody ' ?
In the video you linked, the man is speaking half of the time in French (yet with a strong & heavy Breton accent).
@@loicrodriguez2532 its true, but still he has a very unique and precious accent!!!!
yes, the cornish speaker has the annoying (and prevalent) habit of rolling his 'r's, which in my opinion is completely foreign to the cornish language, which obviously should be based on the cornish accent (ie, creaky voice and strong west country 'r' sounds). its a welsh influence from the revival days i think.
we do actually know reasonably well how cornish was pronounced historically though, by the different spellings of various words in the manuscripts. we know for example from the title of the famous tale 'jowan chy an hordh' that cornish underwent to same i -> ei/oi vowel shift that english did and that 'dh' was often clipped from the ends of words, because it was written as 'Jooan Chei a Horr' by nicholas boson and 'Dzhûan Tshei an Hɐr' by edward lhuyd. lhuyd especially was very fastidious (tediously so) about transcribing exact pronunciation as he heard it.
Remarkable. One can only imagine 200 odd years ago, during the Napoleonic Wars, that the Welsh/Breton similarity must have been noticed and exploited for espionage. Perhaps native Welsh and Breton speakers had resembling accents when talking in French.
THANK YUUUUUUU ❤ ......after all my complains about foreign accents into Keltic languages I can finally hear the polished original accents, Breton in particular. Thank you again indeed !!!
Great video. The Breton speech of the two women at 2:29 seems to my ears to have more of a French flavour (though clearly not French) than the speech of the previous 2 men. Interesting to hear the "Our Father", or Lord's Prayer, in Manx at 4:47. Well, it's very interesting to hear anything in Manx, as it's very rare to hear it. Thanks.
We need more support for these beautiful languages .. some think the celtic influence on the birth of "English" is often ignored.. certain dialects are heavily influenced by Celtic languages..be it scots , West Country, Scouse and West Cheshire , North West etc etc
The first Welsh speaker has a mid-century central Anglesey (North-West Wales) accent, and says the following:
"...And I went to the primary school there when I was about six years old, and I had to learn English there because - Welsh is the first language; Welsh has been the language of the family, and the language of the hearth, for years. Indeed, when I was going to school in Llangefni, 95%..."
The second has a modern Mid- or South Wales accent, which I would guess is from around Sir Gaerfyrddin-ish maybe? They say this:
"...I'm also a member of the (or 'a;' Welsh is ambiguous here) Iolo Society comittee, which organises Welsh cultural events in Caerdydd so bardic [unintelligable] between staff and students, comedy nights, trips to see dramas, rugby nights and so on. It's something a little different to the ['gum-gum?' again, unintelligable to my Northern ears]; there's a welcome to everyone, to the society; first-language Welsh students, second-language..."
I'm a native Welsh speaker from the North so I can much better recognise Northern accents than Southern ones. I find it interesting how much variance there is in such a small geographical area.
Gym gym- byrhau ‘y gymdeithas gymraeg’ os dwi'n cofio'n iawn. Shortening of 'y gymdeithas gymraeg’ (Welsh Society). Cardiff Uni student from the 90s.
@@hedfanA ia, mae huna'n neud synwyr. Diolch!
North east Wales, Welsh speakers I always find fascinating. The accent is very strange
My dad’s family was from Mynydd Llandegai, came to the states in 1903.
Still have relatives there. My sister met some a while back.
Family name Humphreys. There’s plenty of variant spellings in our clan.
Dad was from Utica, NY.
@@vilo_h5541Ah, cool! Llandygai's fairly near where I live, actually. I have family from there.
We've been doing some... "hel achau" is the term, which I don't know how to translate into English... family history? I'll say that. We've been doing some family history, and have recently discovered that some of the family emigrated to America around the turn of the century. There used to be a very large Welsh diaspora in the States, to the point of there being Welsh-language newspapers, chapels, sunday schools and even whole Eisteddfodau and so on in places like Chicago. It's always nice seeing some of that lives on.
I’ve been battling with Duolingo’s idea of Irish for over two years, and I was delighted that I could pick out some words in what the Irish people were saying. I haven’t been wasting my time! Yay!
ETA: I could listen to Welsh for ages, what a neat language. And my father’s family has been able to find some of their roots in Devon, so I’m excited to hear Cornish.
These are such beautiful languages. Thankyou for preserving the tongue of our ancestors.
I have Breton ancestry, and it kills me to be unable to find a way to really learn the language
Il y a une méthode Assimil très bien faite, ou "Ni a gomz brezhoneg", des cours du soir dans quelques villes (surtout en Bretagne mais aussi Paris, Bordeaux) et des stages en été (KEAV). Bon courage !
Contact the Mission Bretone in Paris.
There is a youtube channel called "Le Breton Vannetais en Vrai" which gives an idea of how native South-Western Breton sounds like, and its dialectal variations. It also usually gives the Classical Vannetais form. ( The prestige standart form for the dialect. )
The other main dialect that is more widely used as teaching reference is Leonard, in the form of "KLT" Breton ( contains some Cornouaillais forms ). It's what you'll find in most material. Some teaching methods also give a ( Classical ) Vannetais example.
Stick to one reference to learn to speak and work on passive comprehension of other dialects.
Please put some subtitles on this. It’s lovely hearing but would love to understand
Fascinating. I'm a student of Irish and I understood the Scots Gaelic speakers better than the Irish. Of course I learned Ulster Irish, which is closer to Scots Gaelic than the Irish of the south of Ireland. As someone who wants to speak the true Irish language, I find myself upset by the amount of fluent Irish speakers who speak Irish as if it is English, with no attempt at original pronunciation or use of Irish language idioms. However, if having such speakers will keep Irish alive, I'm all for it.
With some of those lads it's hard even to understand their English never mind their Irish and as a Dub I understood the Scottish more as they spoke slower and clearly
I have always found the Irish use of English magical and assumed that it must be sprinkled with the ‘fairy dust’ of Irish Gaelic in rhythm, cadence and humour. It would be a terrible thing if the living Irish language did not persist because of bad teaching or unnatural use 😢
Fascinating. Interesting how each language has it's own 'music', though the words are similar.
Very interesting. I grew up in Cornwall in the 1970s, but have rarely heard anyone speak it, except when I was at school and the headteacher would occasionally read translations of prayers and phrases. She was very big on Cornish history and would come into class and teach us about people like Richard Trevithick and Humphrey Davey, and took us to an Iron Age village called Chysauster, near Penzance I think.
Wow. Beautiful!❤❤
This was amazing. It’s like a lost world.
The second Irish speaker sounded almost identical to the way my grandmother spoke scottish gaelic, I could also understand him pretty well, where in Ireland was he from
I am so happy I understood a bit of what the Gàidhlig speakers said! I keep feeling like my learning isn't going as well as I hoped, but it makes me proud to slowly understand phrases and pieces of sentences after starting a few years ago.
wonderful, wonderful.....loved this
I believe the woman speaking Manx is reciting the Lord's Prayer? I learnt Irish (Gaelige) and can understand most of what native Scottish speakers are saying, as the two languages are so similar, save for pronunciation and spelling. I've never heard Manx being spoken before, but I believe that I can clearly understand what she's saying. Wow!
They both are , practicall the same as Irish
I moved from England to Brittany in 2003. I noticed a difference between the settled Breton farmers and more recent Gallo and French inhabitants.
The Bretons are a more sturdy people who remind me of Welsh and English farmers. They tend towards fairer hair and blue/green eyes compared to French dark hair and brown eyes. My neighbour is delighted that we both have red hair and green eyes as do most of her family.
Even the way in which they interact down the pub is more "Brythonic" 😂 🍻
On my first visit in 1989 a petrol attendant (yes they still had them back then) threw his arms around me and called me brother when in conversation he found that i am part English and Irish.
Kids are taught Breton in school and roadsigns are now in Breton but I'm not sure how far that has helped grow the language again.
I used to visit Brittany a lot during the 90s staying in Spezet usually. The people there are proud of their language and heritage. I loved it there.
The gallo part of Brittany is not more recent. It's where the Breton migrants mingled with Latin-speaking Gauls. They might have been more exposed to the Frankish and Viking invasions than the West but the genetic and cultural influence of those was not significant.
@@lorenegaudin5585
Depends what you mean by recent. I think you imagine a much shorter timescale than me.
@@eleveneleven572 the Gauls and the Romans were in that region a few centuries before the Bretons came to Brittany, so you must be imagining wrong
@@lorenegaudin5585
The Romans left and who were the Gauls ? What language and culture, where are they now, how come the evidence of megaliths etc is very similar to Britain and not the rest of modern France ?
As interesting as it is I can’t get it out of my head playing this to a somebody on Acid just have it blaring from a hidden speaker behind the sofa 😮. Fascinating mind to hear these. Awesome job
Beautiful. So beautiful to listen to these languages.
Scottish Gaelic (4:29) has a lot of similar sounds like the Faroese language, which is a North Germanic language. It makes sense, though, considering geography and the fact that the Faroese are of mixed Norse and Gaelic origins. Just very interesting to hear.
I would recommend you to watch a video called "WIKITONGUES: Christine speaking Shetlandic", I'm sure I recall her mentioning the Faroes in her speech so it would be interesting to know whether you see a similar level of similarity.
Shetland and Orkney have very few Gaelic speakers compared to the rest of the Highlands & Islands as they had their own language, Norn, with Norse roots. Sadly, the last speaker died in 1850.
@r To be precise, Shetland and Orkney have NO Gaelic speakers at all as they were under Norwegian rule for most of their recorded history. Orkney likely had some Gaelic speakers in the Early Medieval period - e.g. monks and raiders who settled there. But the Vikings got rid of them in the 9th century. Shetland may never have had any permanent Gaelic residents at all, likely speaking a dialect of Pictish when the Vikings arrived.
@@jbjaguar2717 It's not very precise to say there are none at all, there will be a handful of people there with a knowledge of the language, even if many of those have moved from elsewhere in Scotland.
There may be a wee bit of influence, but I wouldn't overstate it either. If there's one influencing language, it's likely a Pictish substrate. Shetlands are only a small part of Scotland and they were under Norse rule for a long time, in sheer contrast to the rest.
The Faroese sounds you're thinking may actually originate from Gaelic settlers.
Bretons were often persecuted by the French metropolis, sometimes to disturbing degrees.
false. there was never persecution. it'a a propaganda from brittany nationalist!
This is a great video. If you start the video chapters at 0:00 (or add an ‘intro’ chapter), the chapters will appear in the video.
It’s very sad that Welsh seems to be the only one where the youth have preserved the authentic pronunciation.
It’s worth mentioning that the traditional Cornish pronunciation has been partially lost, due to a large gap between the last native speak and the first “revival” speaker.
Beautiful! Use it forever
Holy-moly! I study Irish and I could partially understand what Scottish Gaelic speakers were saying! I knew that these two were close, but I never really, well, realised (please pardon my tautology) how much.
Theyr the same , Manx too , just with bit of Ulster dialect thrown in , its great !!!
Do you think there's ways for non native speakers to ameliorate their accent to start speaking without an English or French accent? And if so what do you think would be the best ways to do that? Cuz it's pretty sad to see that the majority of speakers of Celtic langauges speak it with a heavy accent.
Of course it is possible! Firstly, if they themselves want this, they should turn on a recording of a person for whom the language is native, and secondly, record their own voice and LITERALLY compare. And just work on theirself, because nothing works better than personal motivation. If we are talking about the system of proper education as a whole, then it is worth introducing a system of language immersion, like in Wales (BUT NOT DOING IT LIKE BRITTANY, because incompetent people teach there, unfortunately). In general, I don’t have a very good feeling about the Irish language, but the worst situation is with Breton. There, the official linguistic norm became a language that from the very beginning was created not for communication, but for identification (google breton unifié). Even 20 years ago, in the late 90s, linguists sounded the alarm bell calling for a solution to the problem and gave it 10 years. More than 20 years have passed. The results are sad.
@@saarinen_east5618 i do agree with you, but the thing is, Wales is still spoken by 20% of in Wales so it's much easier to revitalise it than other languages. Like for example Ukrainian was spoken by 70%, so it was also not that hard to revitalise it. But for languages with very few native speakers now, like Scottish Gaelic, i do think it's much harder. I don't think it's impossible but I do think it's not directly comparable to languages still spoken by a lot of people at the time of revitalisation.
@@gamermapper That’s why I gave the example of the Breton language, which was still spoken by a lot of people back in the late 90s. We have a LOT of material on authentic breton, there are a huge number of recordings of conversations and so on. BUT. All this data is not used and will not be used because the activists are NOT engaged in the revival of the language but are engaged in the creation and promotion of a completely brand new language.
In this regard I give credit to the activists of the Manx language. They really did a great job of codifying and reviving the original language. Respect to the people of Manx!
@@saarinen_east5618 do you have more examples of a language that even tho it's a minority one started being revitalised, including with a good accent and grammar? This does seem possible but really hard. Really how they're more examples!
@@gamermapperCornish is actually in pretty good position, few of Cornish revivalist are either Welsh immigrants or of Welsh descent, so we can expect some common celtic traits to be revived in neo Cornish through Welsh influence. And although majority of Cornish neospeakers don't use proper phonology at least some of them are trying to learn more correct pronounciation.
Wonderful. My great grandparents were from SW Donegal. I can now imagine how they sounded
Hywl pawb! Absolutely fascinating. It's worth noting that the second Welsh speaker's accent is quite soft. Some accents are much stronger, stronger even than the first speaker. I grew up near Caernarfon. Some of the Welsh speakers there had an accent that was really pronounced closer to the Irish Gaelic, or even Icelandic. I think it was from around Bala?
Welsh and Cornish sound similar to my ear. Am i right here? And is there a historical reason for the similarity? Very interesting video. Many thanks
Both descend from a common Brythonic and reconstructed modern Cornish has been influenced by people with a knowledge of Welsh.
Welsh and Cornish are what remains of the ancient Brythonic language that would have been spoken all over what we now know as England and Wales (possibly southern Scotland?). It was largely replaced by the Germanic language of the invading Anglo Saxons in England. There are also some hints of it in place names and local dialects in Cumbria. It's closely linked to Breton. I believe Scots and Irish Gaelic come from a different branch of the Celtic language.
@@ginatindall fascinating. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I am very interested in this period of history.
@@ginatindallthe oldest Welsh poetry originates from what is now Edinburgh
@@ginatindall "There are also some hints of it in place names and local dialects in Cumbria."
The name Cumbria itself has the same origin as the name for Wales, Cymru.
Thank you for posting a comparison of genuine speakers of the Celtic languages!
But is it just me or do even these people have English/French sounding vowels (and sometimes r's)?
The Celtic languages have been in such close contact with English/French that maybe their pronunciation is necessarily influenced by it.
Especially the last Breton speaking woman on the left has a French accent and the Manx speaking woman sounds like she has an English accent.
Yes I was thinking that she was speaking French maybe she was
No, the Irish speakers here are fully authentic.
Irish was a strong language as recent as 1844. The population gap between Ireland and Britain wasn't as many multiples as it is now, so it wasn't like Irish was dwarfed by a sea of English. Indeed, there were more Irish speakers then that there were of Danish, Swedish or even Dutch. Romanian and Basque are the languages you're trying to think of, that have spend millennia cornered and influenced by bigger ones. While Irish has taken on Latin, Norse, French and English loanwords, it's never been excessive (unlike French influence on English). The deterioration of Irish phonology is a *very* recent phenomenon, easily documented and brought by a poor education system and ignorant L2 speakers, which can be easily corrected if people care.
I don’t know about the rest, but Breton has many phonological features naturally in common with French, from centuries of contact, bilingualism, and both forming from the assimilation of Gaulish speakers into new languages (who may have passed down their own accents when learning Latin/Briton). This includes, for some (but not all) Breton dialects a similar r sound. The r in Breton is very variable from dialect to dialect, so hearing a French like r doesn’t necessarily mean the speaker has a French accent. A few more examples are the nasal vowels, and the ‘ü’ sound shared in both languages, and in some other languages spoken in formerly Gallic areas.
@@tchop6839 stop it ,they are speaking Breton as if they were speaking French
@@liambyrne591 who is ‘they’. Nasal vowels and front rounded vowel are old features in Breton, attributing them to speakers having a french accent is just incorrect. The r, it depends. Different dialects have different realizations of that sound. There are speakers who have a French accent of course, but Breton also just has shared sounds. Again, due to 100s of years of contact (particularly with gallo speakers) and a shared Gallic substrate
I do like hearing the Celtic languages, especially in Cornish - knowing the places mentioned, but hearing them in either their original, or back-translated versions is pretty cool.
Bellissimo e molto interessante video. Non lasciate morire le vostre fantastiche lingue!! Giovani: è il vostro compito quello di tenerle in vita, forza!
Bellissimo video... Anche il cornico alla fine... Cymru am byth cymraeg yn byw.... A kernowek hefyd wrth gwrs!
Fantastic video. In my opinion The most important in identity of language is melody. I do video with Polish autentic dialects. Thank you so much.
These are fascinating to listen to.
Another factor of a native language dying out is how it is taught in school, when i was learning Irish in school it was mainly repeating script from books guided by the teacher and in my case i struggled as i feel the soul of the language was lost teaching in this way (my teachers learned Irish in school), when i was in my early 20s i first heard a native Irish speaker (learned Irish first then English) talking on his phone and it shocked me as it sounded so alien to me..
Do not let your tongue be silenced. Keep it alive.
Rhythm is a unifying element, I think.
Does anyone know what video/documentary the cornish example is taken from? I think it's beautiful. 💗
This makes me think of that scene in "Hot Fuzz" in which they needed an interpreter between a villager and the London cop. Not the same, but it makes it so clear how the other languages affect dialects and accents today. This sounded most clear to me in the Scots Gaelic. All of it sounds so foreign, I guess because it is to my American ears. I hear some weird blend of Hebrew, Russian, French, German.... Truly fascinating. Thank you!
Welsh (and Cornish) sounds so epic
Cornish is extinct since long ago, the last native speaker died like 300 years ago so is based on recostruction, so is not like spoken withouth english accent like the other ones
@@Tonyx.yt. No, the people who died in the 1780s were the last first language Cornish speakers, such as Dolly Pentreath. The generation after that were second language speakers (for example the young women who were laughing at Dolly castigating Daines Barrington when he tried to have a conversation with her, because they understood what she was saying), who then passed less on to the successive generation etc. When Henry Jenner started researching the language in the 1870s there were still people who had some knowledge of Cornish. Indeed there were records of people collecting some fragments from old people into the 20th century. We know a lot about Cornish phonology from both the way things were written down at the time, from Edward Lluyd, who had his own IPA alphabet of the time and from studies of Corno-English dialect. The UK Government, Cornwall Council, the Council of Europe, the European Union and UNESCO all say that Cornish is not extinct.
The remnant of the Cornish language could still be heard in the unique English dialect of West Cornwall well into the twentieth century, indeed if you want to get a sense of what it sounded like, listen to Cornish fisherman from the 1940s. Many current Cornish speakers are trying to replicate the intonation of this speech to better reflect the sound of Cornish prior to its loss as a community language.
That's because Welsh is idiomatic and poetic. It can be very flowery(periphrastic) or very economical giving a wonderful sense of beauty and earthiness like the landscape. You can't possess something in Welsh so you say''the brother is with(gyda) me''. You don't really answer yes or no but reply by echoing the question and the word for teaching and learning is the same(dysgu). Welsh is a cool language to learn and when you speak you feel like a Briton speaking to Caesar or Sir Gawain talking to King Arthur. The word for bear 🐻 is 'Arth'.😏
I came across a story of a Cornish woman talking to an English visitor giving directions including you will see the ‘goleudy’ which the English person didn’t have a clue what she meant until a Welsh observer chipped in and said ‘she means the light house’. I hope it’s true and that it means Cornish words still exist even within the English language speakers in Cornwall.
The Celtic languages are among the most beautiful. It hurts my soul that this sublime and beautiful treasure is about to disappear completely.
But it's not , so stop saying it 😅
Welsh is Celtic and it isn't a dying language?
Just found this. Truly fascinating…
What is that first Cornish clip from? Thanks!
These clearly have strong influence from their second or in some their first language
I’m Irish and I can speak it I have never heard Manx spoken and assumed it sounded like Welsh but I realised that in both Manx clips they were reciting the Our Father as an Irish speaker it sounded very familiar yet different.
If you don't mind me asking, how much Scottish Gaelic can you understand? Would you say your Irish is one of the traditional dialects, or something else?
I've heard more than one person refer to all Goidelic languages together as one macro-language, but this terminology seems less popular in Ireland.
@@FireRupee I can understand nearly all of it as Scots Gaelic and Irish are closely related Manx has a lot of words I recognise but not all of them. There are two broad families Irish Scottish and Manx are related but Cornish Breton and Welsh are a separate family of languages.
@@dermot671it's because both Scots and Manx come from Irish Gaeilge. Isle of Mann and west of Scotland were both colonised by the Irish Dalriath clan over 1,000 years ago. They brought the language.
@@musashidanmcgrath it's written and pronounced gallic in scotland. the gauls/galls were always at war with the romans there so they fled to england. when the romans invaded england they then fled to and settled in scotland. scotland was never colonized from ireland. dalriada most likey spread from scotland to ireland..
@@brucecollins641 Everything you've written here is incorrect. The Gauls didn't 'flee to England'. And they weren't just a monolithic group, they were many, many different tribes. Eventually they Romanised their societies yo a greater or lesser extent. There was trade between Gallic and Briton tribes, and the tribes in Scotland were known as the Picts to the Romans. They were not Gauls. It's well established that the Isle of Mann and western Scotland were colonised by Irish clans. Where do you think you get your Mc/Mac clan names from? They are exclusively Irish historically.
I would like to know between these Celtic dialects is there any resemblance .. could they some how communicate together ?
I am doing courses Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh on Duolingo. I'm sure I'll never be fluent in all 3, and it's probably easy to confuse them in the process, but it's fun even to learn a little bit. I do not want these beautiful languages to die.
As an intermediate Scottish Gaelic speaker, listening to Irish and Manx is frustrating. I can almost understand it, but not quite!
Don't be upset! The most important is that you understand Scottish! :D
In fact, neither language is mutually intelligible, except maybe Irish and Manx, but I'm not sure...
@@saarinen_east5618as an Irish speaker, i can understand much more Scottish than Manx but even then I can only really understand Scottish with a transcription
@@ruadhan1798fancy seeing you here
@@DuineDenFhine15 we mix in the same crowds lol
@@ruadhan1798 T’would appear so
They sound the most similar to the Dutch language. I'm Slavic speaker, my native language is Serbo-Croatian
So amazing to hear all these celtic languages. I love all of them and hope they will survive 🙏
I don't really speak a word of any Celtic language, but I've been listening to the Drive the Cold Winter Away album by Horslips for so long now that I can pretty much sing along with the lyrics...
Wow thats so fascinating! Manx sounds very similar to some reconstructions of Old or Middle English ive heard.
As a person who is fluent in Irish I have absolutely no idea what he’s saying
There are parts of the island where you can barely understand people speaking English, that's what makes it tough to learn sometimes. Accents are thick.
I saw in another comment he's speaking a dialect
Cariad fawr o Gymru
Welsh truly is a beautiful language
This video brings me back to my ancestors who spoke these languages. It’s inspiring me to learn these languages .
The old footage is so intriguing! Especially the Manx. As a Welsh speaker, the only other one that I could kind of understand was the Cornish. But only to the extent of I understood the jist. Some similar words like blydhen to our blwyddyn
I also found the Cornish almost understandable from my knowledge of Welsh, and a few words of the Breton made me prick my ears up. The differences between the Brythonic and Goidelic languages are very stark though.
The Irish speakers here are flawless. Tellingly, however, they're old men and from the late 20th century. You'd have to look hard today to find Irish speakers at the calibre of the Welsh ones featured. Welsh speakers can compartmentalise from English, Irish speakers cannot and lean towards creolisation, unable to shut down intrusive English pause words such as "you know", "so", "like" etcetera, and ignore the fundamental broad/slender rule.
Completely agree. It's the same story with Breton, but, frankly, it's just more even sad to see the loss of such an ancient and unique language as Irish is. Breton on the other side is already lost.
@@saarinen_east5618 It is depressing, indeed. If our government had any sense, they'd be calling an emergency. But they don't because all they care about is money. Culture doesn't matter to them. In cruel irony, they're completing the work of the Brits.
Perhaps what may be as bad is some of the Irish people in these comments, high on "copium", trying to pretend like Irish has always been spoken with English phonology. This can be disproven within a few seconds, these folks are in denial, like someone who refuses to admit they've contracted a virus. The first step to healing is admitting to yourself that there is a problem, as painful as it may be to come to terms with.
Labhraím Gaeilge gach lá!
Very sad, it is. I know Ó Curnáin argues that basically any speaker under the age of 64 wouldn't really have fully traditional Irish.
@@pio4362The goverments do not want to save their languages, would not understand wjy they would want to and definitely not be allowed ny their mastets in NY anyway, except whete, as in the Spamish case and Catalan, it is a pretext for further undermining the nation state.