M-Space: The Blog


Fri 18 Jan 2008

Mutual Influence

It's interesting to observe how two languages used in the same geographical area can influence one another.

Just before Christmas I was travelling on a train in North Wales and I heard two older ladies chatting. Although they were speaking in English it was clear from their accent that they were local. One of them said "I've got a cold on me". It struck me that this is not what I'd think of as a common way to say you have a cold in English, but seems to be influenced by the "official" way to say it in Welsh: Mae arna i annwyd (literally, "there is a cold on me).

In fact, most Welsh speakers in this area would tend to say Mae gen i annwyd these days. Although a very literal translation of that is "There is with me a cold", mae gen i is the standard way of saying "I have" (since Welsh lacks a dedicated verb for that concept), so a more natural though still fairly direct translation would be "I have a cold", which is evidently influenced by the usual English pattern.

So it seems that, in this phrase, modern Welsh usage has been influenced by English while colloquial English usage in a still fairly-strongly Welsh speaking area has been influenced by the more traditional (and, many would argue, more correct) Welsh idiom. Of course, I don't know if the speaker in this instance actually spoke Welsh herself.

There are plenty more examples of English constructions affecting Welsh and vice versa. Sometimes it can lead to a certain amount of misunderstanding, as happened at our local gym (so I'm told) shortly after they had acquired a new set of weights. They found that the new weights very quickly started disappearing from the gym, and after some investigation they discovered the reason. It turned out that one of the gym employees, a native Welsh speaker, had put up a poster (in English) asking people to tidy the weights away after use. Unfortunately, she had literally translated a Welsh idiom often used to refer to tidying up, namely the use of the word cadw, whose root meaning is keep. So she had written "Please keep the weights", and naturally the people using the gym were only too happy to do as they were told.

Another anecdote that I remember from my Welsh lessons (and I've no idea if it is true) is really about code-switching (i.e. changing from one language to another, in this case in mid-sentence), although that's not too far removed from the foregoing discussion. It concerns a Welsh-speaking teacher who was talking to some English-speaking parents who'd recently arrived in the area. The concerned parents, wishing to provide adequate support for their child who had been thrust into a Welsh-medium school, wanted to know if they should try to learn Welsh themselves. The teacher intended to say that a smattering of the language would be useful. Unfortunately, the Welsh word for smattering is crap and, unable to find the English word she subconsciously switched into Welsh, so what she actually said was "it would help if you had a crap"!

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