Integration
'Despite being so at one with the earth, their environment, and totally in tune with the ancient cultures and traditions surrounding them, the hippies seemed somehow not to notice that the language of the people who had lived in Wales for centuries and centuries was not in fact English, no, it was Welsh. Generally they made no attempt to encourage their children to learn Welsh or mix with Welsh speaking families, and the notion that they themselves might perhaps learn even a little Welsh, or even attempt to pronounce Welsh place names in a non remedial way, it seems, was, and still is, preposterous.' (SJK, 2006)
posted by Alp at Sunday, May 21, 2006
2 Comments:
who wrote that intro piece ,because they obviously don't know didley. You couldn't survive without integrating,where did you buy you groceries get your car fixed etc? my sister had a really hard time learning to write English because she spoke welsh before she went to school and wrote phonetically as you do when you writ in welsh!!!!And I have an A level in welsh language and Literature- so there!!! Bex
humm, not all welsh-hippies were as open minded as your family. I did learn welsh, and found that i could easly swap between taking welsh and english even in the same conversation.
However many people never bothered to learn the language - even came up with their own 'hippy' version of welsh placenames - crimb-much - crymych. in addition I agree that there was quite a lot of snobbery and often the indigenous welsh people were considered to be odd-old fashioned people.
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