Here is another thing I dislike. My "Uncle Cyril" -my gran's cousin was from Treorchy and used to visit once a year. He loved reading and watching Westerns and was a big Professionals fan. Old pigeon racer and had a steel plate in his head from a mine accident.
Now my gran's family -the Cases- were all over South Wales and after she died I lost contact with them as she had all the addresses and phone numbers!
Anyway, Uncle Cyril and I were watching some old British film and the Welsh in it were sneered at. They were not speaking but gargling by the sound of it. I turned to Cyril: "THAT is not Welsh...is it?" He then told me how the English had tried to stop Welsh as a language.
I had never heard of this and at school we were told Welsh had almost died out as "They find it better to speak English" -I told Cyril. "Idiot boards" he replied. It seems that when he was at school (late 1920s?) he was punished every week as he refused to stop speaking Welsh -English in lessons but school yard and outside the school if a teacher heard the kids speak their native tongue there were two things the teacher did -corporal punishment and making a child stand in a corner or wear a board around his neck that said "Idiot" one of the boards had "Idiot Welsh speaker" on it. I asked whether he stopped speaking Welsh? His reply: "I wore the board a lot!"
There was the odd comic in Welsh and my mother, German, used to watch the Welsh programmes on the TV during the 1970s (they had Asian-Indian- programmes as well which is how we got to see the Sikh Elvis!).
I could never understand why there were no Welsh language comics as they were the best way to keep the language alive through youngsters -there was a zine published in the early 1990s in Welsh but that seemed to be it.
Rambling a bit aren't I? Anyway Dalen Books came along and I'll need to find out if they are still going.
The English also tried to stop Gaelic in Scotland but -as far as I know- didn't use idiot boards. Some old lags on a building site once told me how their teachers had tried to stop them using Gaelic and how they would often respond to a teacher's question with "dirty language" and if the teacher asked what they said they would give the proper answer in English.
Like Wales there were a few Gaelic language comics but not long running.
The question has to be this: WHY are there not more comics published in Welsh or Gaelic? Is there that little interest?
Maybe a question to ask on CBO?
Not a Scots Gaelic speaker myself but there was a TinTin Scots Gaelic version of "TinTin in Scotland" that sold very well a few years ago so there must be a market. I suspect Welsh must be have a much larger market as lots of Welsh speak their native tounge. Scots Gaelic only has about 70k users mostly in the highlands, although it is rising in the Lowlandand/ central belt as families use it as an access language for their kids to other languages ( mostly well off families though) and is also used in other countries. I think the lowlands Scots were as kean to help the English to stop Gaelic and clear the highlands of people . They succeeded in both.
ReplyDelete