Saturday I asked the question: "What is it about the Welsh? The English conquered them in the 13th century and they still haven't given up."

Nick Davies, at MorfaBlog, answered: "We've still got too much to lose, I suppose."

I checked out MorfaBlog. It's in Welsh so I suppose Nick ought to know. I don't read Welsh but it isn't to hard to figure out what he's saying since most of his links are to articles written in English. All the following are MorfaBlog links.

What is it about this little country that is 60 miles wide and 160 miles long. Or is it a country? Like I pointed out, the English conquered it in the 13th century. It never had a modern government other than the one in London. Or is it something other than governments and armys that make a country?

How do the Welsh feel about Wales and England? Check out this little Flash map.

Welcome to our Flash-tastic Interactive Map of South Wales! v1

I wonder what the deal is with Swansea?

Here is an article that covers Wales' first steps to self-rule.

Ambivalent Autonomy
The vote to create an independent regional authority did not come automatically to Wales, as it did to Scotland. The startlingly close vote reveals much about a nation that has both embraced and resisted a colonial mentality

An old joke about God and the first Welshmen has God saying, "I've got good news and bad news. I'm going to give you soaring mountains with thick green flanks, perfect for grazing sheep; I'll give you beaches and coves and gorse-grown headlands above a plentiful sea; I'll give you rolling hills and valleys beneath which you'll find rich minerals. Your land will be one of the most beautiful on earth."

"Great!" the first Welshmen reply. "What's the bad news?"

"Wait until you see your neighbors."
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A couple of articles on Welsh musicians. I didn't know that John Cale, of the Velvet Underground, was Welsh.

Welsh for Zen

Yet both bands have found a way to incorporate their national heritage into their music; both have recorded in Welsh, and often return to the language as a badge of pride as well as willful display of stubborn eccentricity and obscurantism. In a sense, the music they make is as much a part of their particular location as the Velvet Underground were to their own. The isolation of Wales mirrors the isolation of New York’s outsider scene of the late ’60s, enabling artists to gleefully make music free from the constraints of expectation. Whether in his writing or in his music (like the Dylan Thomas tribute Words for the Dying), Cale regularly returns to Wales as a source of energy and inspiration. There must be, as the saying goes, something in the water.

One assumes that the Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci find their homeland as magical as Cale does. Paired together, the two groups represent the same extreme dualities that Cale brought to the Velvet Underground, teamed to create something fresh and exciting. Both bands wield the element of surprise like an instrument, and while it’s doubtful we’ll be listening to archival live sets from either outfit in 30 years, there’s no question that they make for an invigorating now.
[read morde]

ELVIS WAS WELSH

A new book claims that Elvis Presley's roots lay not in the American Deep South but in the Welsh valleys.
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It seems that language is part of what makes Wales Welsh. Nick has several links to articles on language. Languages do predispose people to think in certain ways. A language like Welsh could be part what keeps the Welsh Welsh.

Debate opens anew on language and its effect on cognition

At a major scientific conference in Boston opening today, a half-dozen specialists in the resurgent field will debate the role of language in shaping the way people think about basic concepts such as space and time. A growing body of research suggests simple quirks of language - such as the lack of a word for left or right - can fundamentally alter the way people perceive the world around them.
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TALKING HEADS
SPEAKING OUT OF BOTH SIDES OF YOUR BRAIN

Since the 1960s, it has been part of the popular lore that the left brain is cold, rational, and analytic, while the right brain is intuitive, impulsive, and holistic. Silly as such dichotomies might be, it does seem likely that the left hemisphere is the more expert and automatic when it comes to language–a probability that imbalanced bilinguals, condemned to talk out of the right side of their brain, can only rue. We can’t all be like George Steiner, who claims to experience English, French, and German as "perfectly equivalent centers of myself." Nor can we hope to emulate the great linguist and polyglot Roman Jakobson who, owing to his heavy accent, was reputed to speak seven languages, all of them Russian.
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Now, Welsh is not Japanese but this gives you an idea of how a different language creates different cultural values. Or as Marshal Macluhan said, "We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us."

So You Want To Learn Japanese.

Japanese grammer is not for the faint of heart or weak of mind. What's more, the Japanese also do not have any words for "me", "them", "him, or "her" that anyone could use without being incredibly insulting (the Japanese word for "you", for example, when written in kanji, translates to"I hope a monkey scratches your face off"). Because of this, the sentence "He just killed her!" and "I just killed her!" sound exactly the same, meaning that most people in Japan have no idea what is going on around them at any given moment. You are supposed to figure these things out from the "context", which is a German word meaning "you're screwed".
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Or maybe is just a sense of place that makes Wales Wales. This last link is a RealAudio link from a regular Internet webcast that I do from my living room. The show we do is called TestingTesting. It is primarily a music show but we do have some spoken word on it. This piece is from one of our regulars—Barton Cole. He is reading a Dylan Thomas poem about Thomas' childhood in Wales.

I will be going back to MorfaBlog for more clues.

I wonder what Morfa means?