by Yesterday was a relatively normal Saturday. In the morning I watched my cousin’s youngest boy play football and dropped him off after his four mini-games. “I’m a defender,” he said with pride and excitement just before the games started. He defended resolutely and was awarded joint player of the day for the second week in a row. I had lunch with my cousin, then went for a drink in Petone with probably my best friend, or at least the person I have most in common with here in Wellington. We talked about Brexit, work, the Spanish election (go Podemos!), travel, and more Brexit. Later I saw Independence Day 2 with my friend from the tennis club. The rest of the world doesn’t accept “America saves the world” as it did in 1996, and there was more laughter from the audience than I can ever remember from a non-comedy film.
Today I haven’t been in contact with anybody and I’m fine with that. I’ve got my English teaching tomorrow; it’s time I concentrated on that and my exit plans. Kiwexit? Kexit? Plenty of portmanteaux have been bandied about for the possibility of other countries leaving the EU: Czech-out, Italeave, Finnish and so on. How about, off the top of my head, a Frog-off?
Here’s an article in the Guardian about Ebbw Vale, a Welsh town that once had a thriving steelworks but has in recent times relied on EU money (a lot of it) to stay afloat. It has very little immigration. Ebbw Vale voted decisively (62%) to leave the EU. The number of people who voted against their interests is quite remarkable.
The road sign above is interesting to me. The word for Wales in Welsh is Cymru but, like other Welsh words, it undergoes mutation in some circumstances, meaning the initial letter changes depending on (I think) the last letter of the previous word. In some cases Cymru becomes Gymru, and in other cases it turns into the weird-looking (to my eyes) Nghymru. Another example: maes (which means field) turns into faes after certain letters such as n. Apparently Welsh speakers make the mutations when they speak without really thinking about it. This changing of the initial letter is just one reason why using a dictionary in Welsh can be quite challenging. Another is that some digraphs such as ff, th and ng act as single letters. (Imagine for a minute that th, when it makes a single sound, counts as a single letter in English that comes between t and u in the alphabet. This isn’t as silly as it sounds: th was once written as a single very-different-looking letter in English. The word think would then come after time in the dictionary, and athlete would come after attempt. But pothole, which just contains t followed by h and not the th letter (because there’s no th sound), would come before potion, not after it. I’ve lost you now, haven’t I? But these sorts of things crop up all the time when using dictionaries or other alphabetical lists in Welsh.) Welsh is fascinating but I need to be concentrating on Romanian. I also need to be getting into linguistics properly but have no idea how. It’s frustrating as hell.
