Those pesky Welsh place-names!

[Pamela.Ebrey]

Recently I attended a genealogy presentation on how to do English research from not-England, which comes in handy for someone like me who lives in Alabama but was born in England and has ALL her ancestors over there.

The speaker started out by telling us all how he had been doing English genealogy for over 40 years, etc., then the meat of the program was an overview of a lot of different websites. Okay, so I knew about most of them but I did learn a few things so that was cool.

Then he walked us through a real live example of how he had tracked someone through all the ages and places using just online resources. He started in London so I sort of stopped paying attention until I saw he had moved up to Shrewsbury, where I have a lot of ancestors. Got bored again after a minute and was thinking about my next meal (something I can always think about!) when I suddenly heard him say something that sounded exactly like "And then they moved to Ann Boleyn."

Ann Boleyn?? Looking at the slide on display, I saw that he had crossed the Welsh border and was focused on a town with a name too small to read from my seat. Then he said it again, but now it sounded like Lan-goal-in.

The light bulb came on....he was aiming for Llangollen!

Seeing as the migratory trail looked like it was heading further into Wales, with even more pronounciatory pitfalls ahead, I stopped thinking about dinner.

Sure enough, the next stop was Llanymynech. Only it came out as Lane-ee-MY-netch. I might have snorted a bit too loudly at that point because the speaker glared at me and said, "Or however you say it."

Now, I'm not Welsh, but when I was growing up my mother's parents ran a hatchery just outside of Welshpool and we used to visit a lot. I remember struggling with a Welsh place name when I was about 8 years old and my grandmother firmly told me that "you must learn to say it properly or it's disrespectful."

You would think a genealogy presenter would have though to at least check the pronunciation beforehand.

And I did get something out of the class... a couple of new websites and the firm association of Ann Boleyn with a small Welsh town. 

But, oh how I wish his example family had made it as far as Llanfair PG!

Pamela

[Pejic]

I was born and brought up in Wales, unfortunately at a time when teaching the Welsh language was discouraged, However I did get the pronunciation.  Years later when having a foreign girlfriend navigate me around Wales a problem arose because she was relying on getting the first 4 letters of the place name before trying to find it on the map - the first 4 letters more often than not being Llan !!!

[Mike in Cumbria]

"you must learn to say it properly or it's disrespectful."

 

Couldn't agree more.

[tedscout]

I live in Australia and even I know how to pronounce Llangollen correctly.

(My God father would kill me if I pronounced his Golf Club incorrectly)

However, I tell everyone I got married in Mold - although my husband (the 5th gen Aussie from a convict - never set foot in UK until he got married man) can say Yr Wyddgrug like he was born there.

[Ian999]

I agree that it is disrespectful to not even try to pronounce a word correctly, or not to apologize before hand, but non-Welsh speakers often have a hard time getting their tongues around the syllables.

However at least Welsh place names are spelled just as they are spoken. In my mind there is little excuse for the English to have Cholmondeley, or the Scots to have Milngavie.

And don’t get me started on Gaelic in which a perfectly normal letter is pronounced the same way across all the languages of Europe but is pronounced totally differently in Gaelic. This just makes learning a language doubly difficult.

[omega 1]

I had Welsh Father ,English Mother & never lived in Wales.
Father would`nt teach me Welsh

I go to Pembrokeshire a lot & when there to PRO.

I had 2 sets of 3xGreatgrandparents & 1 lot of 1x Greatgrandparents live in Mynachlog ddu.

I used to apolgise to the Staff at PRO but finally after a lot of practise i could pronounce it.They were thrilled saying how hard a lot of Welsh places are to pronouce

[Cell]

Recently I attended a genealogy presentation on how to do English research from not-England
Pamela

Well,  I think the big problem began  in the title of the speech "On how to do English research" (sic) .  No-wonder the speaker couldn't pronounce simple Welsh placenames .
Calling it English research is far, far  more insulting than mispronouncing place names .

 As a proud Welsh born and bred person, I am never, ever insulted if a person can not pronounce them. I just kindly correct them on the pronunciation so they then learn how it's pronounced - You can't  really expect people who have never set  foot in Wales to correctly pronounce them.

 If I had been at that talk ,I know that I couldn't have sat there without saying something to the speaker " English research"!  whilst referring to two  different countries within Britain - That is  being very ignorant and disrespectful , mispronouncing place names is not ( I think I would have been rolling around the floor with laughter at those pronunciations , good fun ) .

Welsh was compulsory when I went to school. It was a compulsory subject  for the first 3 years of secondary school in Wales, before that the basics were taught  in primary schools.

Kind regards

[Skoosh]

I think Milngavie  is Gaelic written in Scots. Gaelic only has eighteen letters and is pronounced as spelled you just have to learn the letters, not how they are pronounced in English.

Skoosh.

[KGarrad]

I was fortunate to work in Wales for a while - "Up the valleys"!

My colleagues coached me to pronounce the towns and villages I travelled through:
Cwmfelinfach
Ynysddu
and even Ystrad Mynach!

My grandmother helped, by teaching me 1 to 10 in Welsh!

Now I am back on the Isle of Man, I find there are 2 distinct sets of place names.
Viking-Norse
and Celtic

That leads to differences in pronunciation!
E.G. Ballaugh, where the ending is pronounced as in chuckle(! ), and Maughold, which is something like Mac-cold!

Laxey was originally Laksaa (Laks = lachs = Salmon)
Ramsey was originally Ramsaa.

But Creg-ny-Baa is pronounced . . . baa, as in sheep!

Very confusing!