Bendigeidfran e-shrine

an e-shrine for Brân fab Llyr

[bendigeidfran]

https://www.etsy.com/listing/893921143/bendigeidfan-bran-the-blessed

Bendigeidfan - Brân The Blessed

Original ink drawing/painting on high quality, A4, 300gsm paper. Brân the Blessed, symbolised by a raven, was a giant king of Britain in W

[bendigeidfran]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/society/myths_mabinogion_02.shtml#:~:text=The%20second%20story%20centres%20on,Matholwch%20the%20king%20of%20Ireland.

An article about the second branch of the Mabinogion, on the BBC Wales History website.

[sillian]

Irish Sea swimming

[horrorandhalloween]

[butteryplanet]

cinemagraph artist on instagram

[lovewales]

Cadair Idris |  by Kris Williams

[lovewales]

Ogmore-by-Sea  |  by Paul Dunn

[juliancalverley-deactivated2019]

From this weeks trip west.. The River Machno, near Betws-y-Coed, Conwy, North Wales..

[coto524]

as a welsh person i want you all to accept that W is a vowel because honestly it makes pronouncing acronyms so much easier. wlw becomes ‘ooloo’, wjec becomes ‘oojeck’, love yourselves and stop giving us shit when we tell you welsh has 7 vowels. english actually has 15 vowel sounds but because y’all only use 5 letters you have to rely on a spelling system devised by satan

[saethwr-blog]

and please, enough with the “keyboard smashing” jokes. not original, not funny.

[coto524]

“ #okay but can any of y'all even pronounce your own town names tho? #bye”

yeah, we can actually because the spelling is phonetic. meanwhile english folks have placenames like bicester or keighley or beaulieu, which you have to learn the pronunciation for individually because the rules are so inconsistent. i mean people can’t even agree how to pronounce marylebone but sure welsh place names are the weird ones

[coto524]

“#But are you aware your language literally looks like a potato rolled across a keyboard”

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

fun fact: the english have been taking the piss out of welsh for years, just like they’ve been doing for irish, and scots gaelic, and cornish, and british sign language, and a hundred and one other languages, because evidently the fact that the whole world isn’t anglophone and monocultured and Still Part Of The Empire is a problem, and something that needs to be corrected

[sithofren-blog]

(quietly cheers in support of the Welsh, and your language sounds beautiful, too)

[tiocfaidharlulz]

drag them, wales!

[lizimajig]

Go Wales

[thebaconsandwichofregret]

the thing people need to get through their heads is what the original statement is:

W is a vowel, and LL and FF are single letters not two Ls or two Fs. Saying LL is two letters is as dumb as saying W is two letters just because it looks like two Vs.

We have a different alphabet, it just looks a lot like the english one.

[systlin]

Welsh is, in addition, one of the oldest surviving indo-European languages. It dates back as far as 4,000 years and is one of the few surviving Celtic languages. 

[ceruleancynic]

HELL YES WELSH.

[dottewa-deactivated20200728]

In English, y is sometimes a vowel and sometimes not. This makes far less sense than “w is a vowel,” because the letter belongs to one thing.

In Spanish, l is a consonant and ll is a different consonant and a single letter. This is exactly the same as Welsh using ll as a single letter.

The fact these are seen as strange even though there’s very, very simple parallels everyone who speaks two of the most common languages in the world, with a very very high overlap between casual phrase usages, is entirely propaganda meant to destroy people’s interests in relearning their culture as it’s being systematically repressed and destroyed. And it’s working. Because we can’t be bothered to think, “w is a vowel, just like y except it’s always”.

[kyraneko]

Making fun of something for being hard to learn when you haven’t even tried to learn it and thus have no idea how hard or easy it is to learn, is the pinnacle of laziness as assholery.

Make fun of English instead; most everybody knows it and the mockery is much more deserved.

[stammsternenstaub]

I was going to add this in the tags, but actually I won’t.

The violent suppression of Welsh in schools lasted until about the 70s, by which time it had done so much cultural damage that we’re still unpicking it literally here on tumblr dot com in 2019.  If you’ve ever laughed at Welsh for how it looks or sounds, or whether or not its native speakers can actually speak it, you’re literally participating in that damage splash zone. 

The specific method for suppressing Welsh in schools was a wooden sign called a “Welsh Not”, used in the 18th - 20th centuries, until about the 1940s.  If a child was heard speaking Welsh (or reported to a teacher for speaking Welsh by another child) then they would wear this sign around their neck, humiliating them for speaking their native language.  This sign would be transferred from them if another child was heard (or reported for) speaking Welsh.  At the end of the day, the child wearing the Welsh Not was beaten.  This, as you can imagine, fosters an environment of shame and isolation, and destroys any natural solidarity between Welsh children in schools as it literally encourages them to turn on each other to avoid corporal punishment.

(Fun “imperialism is awful” fact, this method was so effective that Japan adopted it (in the form of a “dialect card”) in order to violently suppress the Ryukyuan languages, which has left most of them critically endangered.)

[pineau-noir]

[bendigeidfran]

[bendigeidfran]

A Prayer to Brân's Head

Hail the disembodied head

croesawu'r pen bendigedig!

Without a body, you built community

croesawu'r pen bendigedig

You lived indoors for 80 years

croesawu'r pen bendigedig

Keeping spirits high with chwedlau and knowledge

croesawu'r pen bendigedig

Be with us as we physically distance

croesawu'r pen bendigedig

Hail, head of the giant king!

croesawu'r pen bendigedig

[cisphobic-mordred]

celebrate welshness. celebrate welsh culture and language and folklore and tradition. Its 2020 I'm tired of hearing jokes about how welsh is a stupid language or whatever like children weren't fucking beaten & demeaned for speaking their own native language

[bendigeidfran]

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095458341

[bendigeidfran]

O Gymru

[thefierybiscuit-deactivated2023]

Mist over Llyn Cwmorthin

[lovewales]

Tremadoc Bay from Harlech Castle  |  by David Wooler

[visitheworld]

The old roman bridge at Penmachno / North Wales (by Stephen Elliott).