I have wondered the same thing but apparently it wasn’t. “Cardiff” is nearer the original Welsh – “caer taff” – the fort on the Taff – but it has been re-welshified for polital reasons to the ridiculous Caer-deethe which means nothing whatsoever.

For those who don’t know – Welsh is being forcibly revived after almost dying out in most of Wales! And cardiff, although the capital of Wales, is virtually Welsh-free except on road signs and government documents where it served to double the amount of paper used

And whats so unusual about transliteration? Most languages that adopt foriegn words for everyday things do this to some extent. Its arguably necessary as the Welsh vowel ‘w’ better represents the appropiate sound, and, as already pointed out here, Welsh is highly phonetic (unlike English). Incidently, its Ambiwlans.

@54, Welsh ['ll'] is not aspirated, it is a lateral alveolar fricative. Also, you meant velar stop, not glottal.

OK, I stand corrected on the linguistic terminology.

But “ll” really isn’t pronounced “cl”.

@cory: And from the perspective of the Romans who came up with our alphabet, both English and Welsh are awkwardly squeezed into Latin pronunciation. There’s no logical reason that “th” should represent the þ sound any more than “dd” should. It really comes down to which set of monks you got — if I recall correctly, the monks who transcribed Welsh were from Ireland whereas the monks who transcribed Anglo-Saxon were from Germany. You might as well accuse the supremely elegant orthography of Finnish of being irrational because y takes a sound more like English “u”.

On the topic of this blog, I will say that I’m damned proud of the astronomy & astrophysics research we do at Prifysgol Caerdydd (Cardiff University). In the time I’ve been here we’ve deciphered the Antikythera Device, discovered a dark-matter galaxy, laid excellent ground for gravitational-wave detection and I’m involved in some very exciting research about the nature of dark energy. I’m waiting for the day Torchwood starts asking us for advice…

Your premise is wrong on two counts.

1. The Act of Union was a political union of Scotland and England to create Great Britain in 1707.

2. The Union of the Crowns a century earlier in 1603 was just that – a Union of Crowns. It was not that the Scottish Crown disappeared or dissolved into the English Crown, it was a Union of both. In fact the first King of that Union was the Scottish King James. Therefore the Scottish crown is still extant in exactly the same way as the English crown.

The sexual connotation of the word permissive is relatively modern. Though we do tend to call them concessionary footpaths nowadays

But the Welsh didn’t have ambulances until Wales was under English control, so they didn’t derive it directly from its root. The root of the English word ambulance is indeed ambulare but the welsh ambwlans is a straight transliteration of the English word.

But the astronomer royal for scotland was founded in 1834, long after the act of union.

The English effectively killed off the Welsh language over the past few centuries, and the resurrection of the past few decades is the result of a very focused effort of a small group of Welsh nationalists. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but when you miss an exit for the umpteenth time because of a badly designed road sign, the joke wears a little thin.

You don’t. You do, however, go from dhyana to zen via the Chinese ch’an.

Zen is derived from the PIE base *dhya, “to see” while dharma is derived from PIE *dher “to hold”.

(I hope you noticed the “SLOW” signs marked everywhere on the roads – I always keep my speed right down, I wouldn’t want to hit an “ARAF”!)

> Why is there no Astronomer Royal for Wales? <

Possibly because Wales has never been a kingdom.

The ol’ French Duke just properly Latinized the alphabet. Didn’t do a great job of it, sure, but he may have been the only Frenchman who was better at conquering than being prissy about language.

Ambulance comes from the Latin Ambulare (and goes back to when patients would be carried in stretchers), so really its not just the Welsh who have changed the spelling
Words like that have their own varients in pretty much every language that has apopted the technology/practice/service in question, never understood the different treatment people from England give to this custom when they encounter it in Welsh, especialy when English is literaly full of similar examples.
That said rather a large chunk of the Welsh vocabuary comes from French and Latin.

I’m Welsh, and I had no problem with the joke. I laughed too. It’s not offensive in the slightest. If anyone’s been Welsh for any discernible length of time, they should be used to the jokes by now. It’s just one of our little quirks.

Not funny at all. English had those letters, too, but Billy the Conqueror and his scribes only used the latin alphabet, so we got ‘th’ instead of the original ‘thorn’ character. Ditto ‘gh’ ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ which all had their own letters in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet. ‘GH’ especially got mangled – there were three forms of it, all now mashed into 1. Imagine ‘bough’, cough’ and laugh’ having different letter endings to understand the confusion since caused.

As to ‘w’ being a vowel – it always has been! It’s a double-u, literally.

@cory: “What I really don’t get is why the Welsh community doesn’t create a spelling reform.”

That should be the other way around. Welsh is pronounced exactly as spelled. A welshman once gave me a 15 minute lesson. That’s all you need to pronounce Welsh passably. It’s English that needs reform. Give us our letters back!

I drove in the Bahamas and in England while on vacation. I think car rental places in these countries really should offer driving lessons before renting to us. I was at my most disadvantaged when trying to make a left turn onto a two way street,,,did you know drivers in England use the same one finger salute we do??? ,,,and I think arsehole means “Howdy there stranger”???

Gary 7
PS: Does “blooming idiot” really mean “Your intellectual development is coming along fine”?

Then there is the Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll