Our Language

 What is shame? it's a shame and it's sad that if we Welsh & Bretons could build a portal to let in the the ghosts of our past, and that if we met & hugged our great grandparents, we would have nothing to say to them, because they would be speaking a different language. Can anything be more shameful than the wanton destruction of the key part of our heritage. Admittedly it was state policy in London, but it's now the 21st century and God helps them who help themselves. The Welsh intelligensia from the Tudors and even earlier, including Glyndwr, were educated in London and/or Oxford, so it's no wonder that when Cymru did its part for the enlightenment movement spreading across Europe & America, it was the likes of Iolo Morgannwg and the London-Welsh societies, the Cymmrodorion & the Gwyneddogion who stood for the ethos that "every folk had its own particular identity, which was expressed in its language & culture". In the middle of the 19th c. Lady Charlotte Guest & Lady Llanover worked positively for the language, they were friendly with Villemarque who was their counterpart in Brittany, and the Welsh farm labourer could be counted amongst the most literate in the world, there was a genuine revival. Lady Charlotte translated the Mabinogion to a wider world, Villemarque wrote an anthology of Breton songs & stories. Then it all came crashing down, it became government policy to ban the Welsh Language in schools, decided on after the release of the 1847 report of the inspectors of education, nick-named 'Brâd y Llyfrau Gleision' (Treason of the Blue Books) followed by the education Act of 1870. The Welsh (& Breton) speaking children were humiliated by having to wear a piece of wood around the neck if they continued speaking their mother tongue. I think it's fair to say that it affected us.