Category: llefydd

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Map i Gymru: building an OpenStreetMap in Welsh

I’ve cross-posted this post on Open Data Institute Cardiff blog as well. Thanks to David Wyn Williams for his invaluable help on the post.

The draft map

Have a peek at this map of Wales, with place names in Welsh.

https://openstreetmap.cymru

Many people have never seen place names in Welsh such as Aberteifi, Treffynnon or Aberdaugleddau on an online map – or indeed any map.

These names have been used for many generations until the present day, from conversations to road signs to media. The Welsh-language Wikipedia, known to its users as Wicipedia Cymraeg, has articles bearing these names.

Nevertheless they are not usually offered or recognised by the well known proprietary map providers.

In order to build a map in Wales’ own language we at the project have drawn from freely licensed OpenStreetMap data, server software, and documentation. These are all the work of many contributors around the world, and to these people we are very grateful. We are also very thankful to the Welsh Language Unit of the Welsh Government who have funded this early work.

Building on the map

This is a draft map running on a prototype server. It gives you the ability to pan and zoom. As the developer on this project I am very pleased with the results so far.

I will introduce another feature very soon – the ability to embed this map on any website.

Nevertheless you might spot omissions or glitches while it’s being developed, and some big areas for functional improvement.

As I write this we have received a bundle of very useful place name data from the office of the Welsh Language Commissioner, which is itself the fruit of years of dedicated work. This is comprehensive down to the level of villages, and licensed under OGL.

Improving the data

This section contains background if you are interested in improving OpenStreetMap place names and other data.

Imports of the OSM data happen automatically overnight. Some pre-rendering of map tiles is also done, to speed things up.

The ideal OSM data set for place names in Welsh would have a name:cy tag for every single item. We are not there yet.

In the meantime my system uses name:cy tags and some name tags.

name:cy has highest precedence. If you want to add a definitive name in Welsh to anything, edit the map on osm.org and add a name:cy tag. You will need to create a user account if you don’t already have one. Provided your submission is accepted by the community this will guarantee its inclusion on the next nightly update.

Many name:cy tags already exist.

The challenge with the existing data is that some names that we want to use are currently only available from the name tag. That is, many places do not have a name:cy tag.

Understandably OSM contributors haven’t tended to add an identical name:cy tag for Morfa Nefyn, Abersoch, and hundreds of other villages and places.

I’ve tried rendering different versions of the map using different criteria. Enabling all name tags somewhat ruins the ethos and magic of having a map in Welsh. Then huge tracts of Wales vanished when I removed the name tags again!

So I have set the system to use name for these types of places only:

  • ‘village’
  • ‘hamlet’
  • ‘town’
  • ‘island’
  • ‘neighbourhood’
  • ‘square’
  • ‘farm’
  • ‘isolated_dwelling’
  • ‘locality’

For other elements I also have a white list and black list, e.g. ‘Ysgol’, ‘Capel’ and ‘Eglwys’ are on the white list, among others. We will tend to want names containing those words.

name:cy currently overrides all of this however. Do please add name:cy tags via osm.org if you spot errors or gaps, and they will also be available to other projects around the world.

Use and applications in the near future

What you see now is just one possible app that uses the underlying map infrastructure to show a map of Wales.

Having a map like this introduces many exciting possibilities in:

  • learning
  • exploration
  • navigation
  • play
  • research
  • communication
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Why do we have Anti-Terrorist Hotline in Cardiff? (More poster madness.)

These chemicals won't be used in a bomb because a neighbour reported the dumped containers.

Just a couple of days ago, I mentioned some really odd police posters I’d seen in Cardiff. This isn’t about those posters. (At least those police ones were trying to make some kind of valid point, but failed.)

It’s about the ones that say “These chemicals won’t be used in a bomb because a neighbour reported the dumped containers” and the like. I’ve only seen one so far, on Clare Road in Cardiff just now. When I say poster, it’s actually a huge billboard.

Cory Doctorow already did a pretty fine job of covering the lunacy and “socially corrosive” effect of these posters in London. So I won’t rehash what he said.

I’m mainly here to point out the amplified ridiculousness of having this poster displayed in Cardiff, Wales – where we have no living memory of bomb planting nor acts of terrorism. (Correct me if I’m in any way wrong on that. Sheesh.)

Is this a threat now? Do they know something we don’t? The answer to both those questions is “no”. If London doesn’t need this, we in Cardiff really don’t need this. Clare Road is a main road running through Grangetown – which enjoys fairly decent levels of respect and integration between different people, thanks very much.

I can think of several things more appropriate and meaningful to do in the locality than reporting my neighbour because they might appear to have weird hobbies. Here’s the spot on Google Street View. You might prefer to remember it as the location where the band Super Furry Animals did a couple of photoshoots.

The remixes of the posters are well worth a look – a great antidote to the fear mongering.

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Loads and Loads and Loads of Unsold Cars

Here’s a Guardian gallery with fleet upon fleet of unsold cars.

If you like

  • big pictures
  • of large numbers
  • of small things

you’ll LOVE it. Unless you’re a car manufacturer.

There’s a huge one of these car facilities on the M5 motorway in England, going south-west towards Clevedon or other Somerset towns. I used to see it when driving to LOUD Mastering studio in Taunton or friends’ houses. Avon and Somerset is a part of the world which fascinates me. For a start you have Portishead town which spawned a rather good band. I would say there is a slight difference in pronunciation emphasis between the town name and band name. The area of Avon is named directly after the River Avon, derived from something like “afon” in Brythonic, which in modern Welsh just means “river”. Then in Somerset, I’ve never been to Nailsea but the town of Clevedon is an ultra-quiet coastal town with a pier. Then deep into Somerset (by my reckoning) you have those peculiar village names like Curry Mallet, Curry Rivel and Temple Cloud. Of which the latter has a signpost saying “canine hydrotherapy centre”. Which to me was a new concept but apparently not entirely as mystical foo-foo as it sounds. Speaking of which, there’s also Glastonbury town which of course lends its name to the festival – known by locals by the quaintly modest name of “Pilton Pop Festival”. Back to the cars, you see them on the right-hand side while driving due south-west over a bridge. On a map it would be here. It looks very spectacular down at Avonmouth Docks and I wouldn’t do it justice by attempting my own photograph. If you’re driving, don’t take your eyes off the road. These thoughts all occurred to me within seconds of seeing those Guardian car pictures. Serious.

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Pidgin Stryd

There’s a scene in Alan Bennett‘s semi-autobiographical play The History Boys where two teachers are discussing the English language. Hector, played by Richard Griffiths, remarks to his colleague that he loves language. Not merely “words”, he says. “That would be so… Welsh!”. They both chuckle.

I wasn’t able to quote that one exactly as I watched it on TV back in Christmas 2007. But disregarding for now the possibly that Hector might not know an englyn from an awdl, there seems to be a grain of truth in that comment.

It’s also my warning shot for what follows. This post has more of my highly personal perspectives on learning the Welsh language, following my first post on that theme. Below contains PIECEMEAL DISCUSSION OF INDIVIDUAL WORDS. If you’re a Welsh speaker, I guess you should substitute “warning shot” back there for “bait”. Words? You LOVE IT.

If you don’t love it, start your own blog because I’d like to read more Welsh language blogs.

Anyway. I got through wlpan and am now on the pellach course. Despite my shortcomings, language is a general interest of mine. I often think and talk about the English language. It’s one of my favourite subjects. But Welsh speakers totally rule on this one. They talk about their language A LOT. And now, it’s starting to feel like my language too in some ways – so I gladly follow suit.

“But Welsh is such a difficult language to learn”, people tell me. They’re right in some ways. ALL languages present difficulties; Welsh has its own. Written Welsh uses the Latin alphabet which can be deceptive – it’s immediately familiar but rendered differently. Comparisons to English are inevitable and understandable. If English is all you have in your toolkit, of course it’s going to look strange. That’s what the learning stage is all about.

English is a pretty versatile and useful language. I like English. Actually I love it. Although I imagine it’s a right bitch to learn as an adult. Irregular verbs, wonky spellings, arbitrary plurals, bits of Saxon, Greek, Latin and French all mashed together. Fortunately I started learning English as a baby and freely enjoy all the benefits it brings, with none of the confusion of, say, whether to use “bring” or “take”. Or what exactly the word “it” means and to use it.

So right now I’m missing the word “it” because my brain fibre seems to have wired itself around the word. So I’m in a process of unravelling some of that and wrapping it around Welsh, which uses different structures.

Check a Welsh-English dictionary for the “it”-shaped hole.

Neither can I say “I don’t mind if I do”, one of my stock phrases when offered, say, a chocolate digestive. All I get is blank faces or laughter if I use “dw i ddim yn poeni os dw i’n wneud“.

Well, it’s nice to be of some amusement.

“But aren’t the dialects in north and south Wales, like, TOTALLY different?”, I hear them cry. No, not at all. It’s one language. Although some of the Gwynedd and Ynys Môn folk have put my confidence here through some rigorous testing, it must be said.

For a few days into wlpan last year I thought I was learning south Wales dialect. Fine. I live in south Wales. My dad’s parents were from Cwmaman which is perhaps where I could be if they hadn’t moved to Slough in the 1940s to find work, along with countless others. South Wales dialect? Here’s my 400 quid. Bring it.

Then I gradually realised it’s partly some kind of bizarre learner’s dialect with bits of schoolly official words that you hardly ever hear (sglodion and micro-don are two examples from the kitchen of nobody I know) and “proper” phrase structures.

But mainly, because I’m in Caerdydd, Y Mwg Mawr, I’m over in Dempseys / Mochyn Du /  Clwb Ifor Bach and picking up Welsh words and phrases from all points of the compass. As my tutor remarked, purely in reference to Welsh and not even in jest – Cardiff is VERY cosmopolitan.

Each of my carefully plotted utterances could involve a word choice, such as teisen/cachen (cake), becso/poeni (worry), nawr/rwan (now) and llaith/llefrith (milk). The latter is an age-old shibboleth which verges on some miniature holy war at the breakfast table. My inclination would be just to adapt and pick one for the situation, in the same way I’ll just say cellphone to Americans like some accomodating chameleon. Everyone’s mate, see. Kindly pass me the milk and let’s get on. Dim siwgr diolch.

The only current exception is losin (sweets). That one’s hyper-regional and I’ve heard not only that but pethau da, fferins, da-da and melysion. And rumours of minciag, neisis, tyffish and pethau melys. How many of these are valid moves in Scrabble Yn Gymraeg?

But other than regional stuff, personality is a big one. In any given tongue, everyone tends to have their own personal micro-dialect, as it were. Part of the language learning process is finding it – refining your personality in the NEW (to you) language. Linguists might have a proper term for this. And it includes individual word choices (UPDATE: The word is idiolect.)

I resigned myself to being known of and thought of as a dysgwr (learner). Although at the very beginning I did entertain fancies of privately learning and emerging as a fully formed siaradwr Cymraeg, there’s no way it could happen like that. So I have to blunder about in public parading my peculiar accent, being all wonky, getting words wrong and enduring the laughs. Actually I like the laughs.

This included an interview for the Deffro’r Dinas column in Y Cymro (a newspaper) and a spot on Uned 5 (a TV show) to talk about Sleeveface in my clumsy pidgin Welsh.

A couple of times I’ve been told I speak like a public warning sign.

Also, drud (expensive) and rhad (cheap) used to get mixed up, as did gwr (husband) and gwraig (wife) – not helped by their proximity in my course notes. If I were the kind of guy that gets embarrassed, this kind of thing would be a problem. Particularly when I casually referred to my female tutor’s child as FY mab (MY son).

But if I was going to be a blundering learner I could at least pick words that sounded ultra-Welsh. So why would I say lico or licio when I could say hoffi (like)? That’s “like” as in “like”, to enjoy or approve – not a kids-overheard-conversing-on-a-bus like… As much as I might amuse myself (and probably myself alone) to pepper my discourse with “fel” or “megis” as I suspect Quentin Tarantino would if he were ever to learn Welsh.

Unlike some, it wasn’t an aversion to loanwords or some romantic notion of “pure Welsh”. That might mean cutting out words like cefndir (background), which smell slightly of English too. (That was just a hunch, but it seems a bit like the thing where “secretary general” smells of Anglo-Norman.) No, I never struggled with these things. Language has always been a mishmash. What are you going to do, cut out the Latin?

Hey! Some words are almost the same all around Europe now. Which is old news. Siocled (chocolate) springs to mind.

It was more about trying to squeeze as much new and exciting Welsh knowledge into a sentence as possible. Thus, warming to my new policy, I dredged up partly forgotten placenames like Trelluest (Grangetown) and Caerliwelydd (Carlisle). And zoomed into saying things like cyfaill (friend) and cyfeillion (friends) instead of ffrind and ffrindiau.

Hey everybody, I’m speaking the Welsh! You can’t get Welshier because I just cut ffrindiau right out of there. Almost literally – thanks to my new found zeal. I eventually chilled out and started using both. I’m told cyfeillion is a bit formal, like the kind of word you’d use in a speech. That’s OK for me. It sits comfortably as I have a personal fondness for the uncommon, the archaic and the perverse. That goes for any language. It’s in my DNA.

When I was chatting at the Eisteddfod I heard someone conjugate lico to make Licwn i (I would like) – albeit not while onstage in the main pavilion. Ergo new outlook. Besides licio is OLD, I heard that they use it in Patagonia, which is a yardstick of OK for these matters. Heh!

One personal trait which runs deeper is that I cannot abide any trace of twee. If there could be a trump card for Carl Morris it would have a rating of 0/10 for tweeness. If the name of the game is twee, then I lose – but I figure I gain so much more. So whoever cooked up popty ping (microwave oven) must feel highly deserving of some kind of award. But not from me. Unless I’m giving an award in recognition of their massive twee face.

In English, I have trouble with “bubble and squeak” for the Bank Holiday Monday breakfast meal. It’s tasty but I cannot allow this ghastly set of sounds to grace my lips. Similarly “I like to cook spag bol in my des res with all mod cons.” is an example of a sentence I would never use. I consider myself a self-respecting human being and only quote it here in mockery of the non-self-respecting.

Obviously it’s not for me to prescribe how anyone else should use language. But neither is it for me to prevent anyone talking like a douchebag.

In among other subjects, I think I’ll MUTATE next time. Ngh!

Mmmmmutations. Don’t hate them. Love them.

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England’s Dreaming

I was reading about the history of these islands last week. It set off a whole chain of thoughts, memories and some unexpected laughs.

I’m particularly enjoying this page.
http://cym.englishriviera.co.uk
Open the link “Listen using ReadSpeaker” in a new window and marvel at the cut glass computer voice making a total hash of the Welsh. Repeat for the other languages. I like the Japanese one, it sounds like a shortwave numbers station.

When I was around 7-years old, I went with my family for a holiday in Torquay on the south-west coast of England. That town and the region surrounding are known as the English Riviera.

Back in Victorian times, the original riviera – the French Riviera – had established itself as an affordable holiday destination, albeit for the rich.

Budget holidaymakers who couldn’t make it to France were a large market. So tour operators on England’s south coast responded with a rebranding exercise and the concept of the English Riviera was born. Giving the tour operators the benefit of the doubt, we could view it as an early example of what marketeers now call positioning.

Among my fond memories I remember the sight of scrawny “palm” trees withering miserably along the sea front. Palm trees don’t grow well in England, but the French Riviera had them so the English gave it a go. They eventually found a breed of New Zealand tree that looked a lot like palm trees, for that hint of class and exoticism for which Devon is (not really) known.

I had a good time in Torquay. But when I visited, the riviera label was already looking outmoded – and that was the 1980s. Now, in this era of low cost airlines, the English Riviera is a tired name, and today’s average 7-year old child will understand this. It surprises me that they persist in using this “me-too” brand rather than promoting the actual distinctives of the place. Why remain in a category in which you can only hope to be number two – or worse?

In music it’s like a tribute band inspired purely by a band that is still alive. What’s the point?

If you’re curious why I returned to the Riviera last week, if only mentally, I’d been searching for the word “Lloegr” on Google (GOOG).

In modern day Welsh, the words for England and English are totally different to each other. Lloegr means the area we now call England and Saesneg refers to its main language. Anyway, this distinction is pretty neat in my opinion. Consider the ramifications!

(Yes, we’re back on the double-Ls, at least for now.)

Lloegr is a very old word with origins in the Brythonic language which was spoken in many parts of what’s now known as Britain.

It’s believed England (as we now know it) was already called Lloegr, or something very similar, before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. And definitely before the Norman Conquest. But that’s another story and, you might say, another victory for the French – thankfully not compounded by any embarrassments involving branding or trees.

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Dolgellau

Recently I heard Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2 refer to the town of Dolgellau in Wales (N52:44:24 W3:53:24). He pronounced it as “Dolga-l-ow” and made the last syllable rhyme with “cow”.

Why-oh-why can’t a broadcast professional do a little research before guessing this pronunciation? A little goes a long way.

(I couldn’t resist writing “why-oh-why” back there, it’s obligatory if you’re passing comment about the BBC. If it’s a positive comment about the BBC – and there are many conceivable ones – then you should finish by emphatically saying “thank you BBC”.)

There is such a thing as a Pronunciation Unit at the BBC for internal use. And a BBC styleguide which is quite a fun read.

There’s also a webpage of audio pronunciations which might be handy, courtesy of… the BBC.

To pronounce Dol-gell-au correctly, the last syllable rhymes with “eye” and the combination “ll” signifies a voiceless fricative sound. Put your tongue as if you’d make an “l” sound then blow air instead.

This sound is not unique to Welsh. Several other languages feature the sound. If you can already speak Navaho, Greenlandic or Zulu – or a combination of them – you’ll have no problem with it.

Thanks for reading my new blog. If you ever try to correct anything so picky as my pronunciation, I’ll fight you.