16 | LEARNING LANGUAGES | OPINION Read a related story: click here


Learning to speak another language may be hard, but it has long-lasting benefits, says Hilary Moriarty


I


t’s not often a sign in a supermarket car park stops you in your tracks. But, newly


moved back to Wales, I paused recently when confronted with a sign which identified where you could collect goods previously ordered on line. The word which arrested me was ‘clicio’, as close as the Welsh language currently gets to defining how you do business online. It made me smile, and I thought it was wonderful. Here is


an example of an ancient language accommodating the 21st century and its jargon, as it must if it is to stay viable through these years of national distinctions dissolving, and sustain its very existence for the next generation and the one after that. Languages have always adapted to modern times – hence the boom in pedantry in English, with purists grumbling about the misuse of ‘infer’ and ‘deduce’ and ‘hopefully’, for instance. So ‘clicio’ is linguistic progress.


But it was a bit of a surprise, in a Welsh language TV soap opera, to hear a character ratle away in Welsh, then suddenly end


her sentence with an emphatic pronunciation of two words: “big time”. She didn’t quite use the air gesture for inverted commas, but she came prety close. But why use the English words at all, when Welsh certainly has simple equivalents? Later she described her partner, as she apparently hauled him by his tie into the bedroom, as “cute” – and again, I’m stopped in my tracks. Can Welsh really not accommodate such a nuanced notion as ‘cute’. (Pause for audience participation – go on then, tell me what it would be in French or German, because ‘cute’ is not quite as simple as ‘good


THE GIFT OF TONGUES


Main image © Freepik.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51