Running down the Champs Elysees, looking for the Mona Lisa
Great 80s Welsh punk track, here in a cover version by a somewhat younger band; the original Anhrefn looked more like this, ie frightening. Quite a lot to write about this sometime soon, as Anrhefn were an uncommonly thoughtful and interesting bunch by the standards of either punks or Welsh Nationalists (which they weren't, not in the Plaid sense anyway), but perhaps not right now as it is the back end of a veeerrrry long week.
What's that? You can't understand the lyrics? Oh, sorry; here they are.
That's a bit better, although several of the words aren't in the first online dictionary I could find. What's the bit about the villages drowning? And the last bit - no picture can compare to the chance to work outside his house? I suspect I'm missing something.
ReplyDeleteIn all seriousness, learning the language (or at least re-learning the Welsh I've forgotten) is one of my longer-term commitments, so thanks for posting this.
Oh wow. I didn't know there were languages that used the Latin script and had words containing only consonants. That's awesome.
ReplyDeleteI don't see why Anhrefn is frightening. It looks like a normal punk show to me. Of course, I don't understand what they're singing, so maybe the lyrics are frightening.
What, like 'sky'?
ReplyDeleteVillages drowning - almost certainly a reference to Capel Celyn, which was flooded as part of the Bala-Tryweryn reservoir project which provides water to Liverpool. Happened in the 1960s I think, but Anrhefn are from round that way and it still does rankle.
ReplyDelete"Gweithio dros" is "working for" - it's a bit idiomatic and Northern so I'm not surprised it's not in the dictionary.
"Sguno" is almost certainly a typo and should have been "sugno".
Ahhh, here we are; Tryweryn, importance of in Welsh politics.
ReplyDeleteThe Anrhefn show was a pretty normal punk show, but look at the actual band - they're not your normal stick-thin punks. Although perhaps I am just remembering things and people as bigger than they were - there was a lot of grief between native Welsh-speaking and native English-speaking locals when I was growing up, basically because there had been a huge influx of English workers and engineers to the Dinorwic, Wylfa and Trawsfynydd power schemes, meaning that the ethnic composition of the local middle class changed massively, more or less overnight.
actually I've just realised that the prepositions taken with "to work" in Welsh are really quite strange. For the English "to work for", Welsh will translate "gwethio am" (to work for £x/hour), "gwethio i" (to work for Bangor Council) or "gwethio dros" (to work for a fairer society - actually this is more like "to serve" as in the title of the DWP's Welsh child poverty strategy, "Gweithio Dros Plant"). There's probably some deep and interesting reason for this.
ReplyDeleteThe 'y' in 'sky' is at the end of the word, so it's moonlighting as a vowel. Maybe we should start using words like skg or thm...
ReplyDeleteI don't know much about Wales, so it didn't occur to me that Anhrefn would be involved in Welsh-English tensions. I remember the lead singer of Social Distortion pointing out that punks were once regularly assaulted, but I often forget how controversial punk music used to be.
I look forward to learning more about (recent) Welsh history and Anhrefn.
How about "rhythm"? Y and W are vowels in Welsh.
ReplyDeleteOr 'sylph'.
ReplyDeleteAs D^2 says, the real point is that the definition of 'vowel' is language-specific. The word 'wrth' has the same distribution of vowels and consonants as the word 'inch', if you know anything about Welsh. And if you don't know anything about Welsh, you should probably not talk about Welsh.
Incidentally, 'Anhrefn' means 'disorder', which is suitably punk (or pync); specifically, according to one lexicon I've consulted, "the kind of disorder for which you seek a chambermaid."
It's a bit of a pun; it can also mean "anarchy". (for English speakers who care, which must surely be an empty set, "an" is a negation prefix and "rhefn" is the mutuated form of "trefn", meaning "order, method, system").
ReplyDeletefor English speakers who care, which must surely be an empty set
ReplyDeleteNot at all sir. I am actually wearing today my bilingual Brains T-shirt that I bought in Cardiff before a match many years ago, mutation to Gymru of course: and having once had a girlfriend in Pontypridd, I did ponder learning the language and bought a Teach Yourself. I was once able to write a letter to Private Eye noting the error of calling something "Ysgol school" and observing that the editor, being Welsh himself, should have known better. Moreover the dozen or so words I can actually remember do, nevertheless, enable me to list Welsh as one of the seven European languages I knew more of than Spanish, at the point I moved to Spain.