Talk:Welsh Not/Archive 1

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Use of Nots

Hello. I'm going to try and dig up some old notes and provide references to my observations about what the Blue Books actually said about the use of nots. If I can I'll also try and find some stuff from naval history on the use of similar stigma with the threat of corporal punishment. I think the idea that 'nots' were endorsed by the English state to stamp out Welsh is an anachronistic view of the language question and is by and large a myth. I think that's a fair comment not a calumny. All communities need integrative myths -'Dunkirk spirit', 'Norman yoke', 'freeborn Englishman', 'Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled...' etc. Welsh was a minority language that was marginalised by the state but to over-emphasise any oppressive behaviour is to misrepresent history: C19th Wales was not C19th Poland.

Arguing a lack of oppression based on not being 19th century Poland (or Ireland and India for that matter) is seriously digging at the bottom of the barrel. There is no moral superiority to be had for somehow not pushing the oppression all the way to cossack charges on protests and military repression. Even then it's not like the british state was much better except in the realm of public relationships abroad. 216.252.75.220 (talk) 09:17, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Comment

"parents would not have paid to expose their children to such a brutal regime unless they sympathised with its aim."

Really? --MacRusgail 18:48, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikify or Remove

Presumably the contributor who says there are few references to the use of the 'Not' has a list (albeit short) of these references and will save the article by appending them. As a counter-argument (and it is only that, in this argumentative and fact-free article) I should point out that the "Not" was also used in schools in South Africa in the period after the Boer war, in order to discourage the use of Afrikaans. In fairness to the English, it was also used by both the French and the Portuguese in their African colonies. If the 'not' is a myth, it's an extraordinarily prevalent one. If something walks and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Perhaps the article should be re-written along these lines, without the anti-Welsh editorialising. As regards parents "not sympathising with this brutal regime", the fact is that their children didn't get educated. They had to choose between brutalisation and ignorance. Of course, modern parents would choose ignorance every time. And in the above comment "Welsh was a minority language". Welsh was spoken by 85% of the 19th century population of Wales. That's some minority!!LinguisticDemographer 15:53, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for taking an interest. Give me a week or so and I'll tighten it up. My notes on the Blue Books are in my filing cabinet somewhere. Since the first census to record the number of Welsh speakers was in 1891 I'm curious as to where you derive your figures about the proportion of Welsh speakers in the rest of the C19th? I did mis-speak above, Welsh was a minority language in this period in the context of the adminstrative unit of England and Wales (despite being a principality, Wales wasn't administratively distinct until the later C19th and the Welsh office post dates WW2) but obviously not in Wales itself, and I should have made this distinction clear. To say the Welsh not is a potent myth is not to say it was never used, it is to say that the incidence of its use is exaggerated and that the essential point (that its use was tolerated and even endorsed by parents and local cultural leaders) is misunderstood by many commentators. Have a look at some of the historical myths I've referenced above. These things happened (ie. they're not fabulous or legendary) but they have become integrative discourses, historial artefacts in their own right (ie. they are mythical). Lack of strong evidence about the use of the not: my point I think? I've been looking in standard histories of Wales for 15 years and can't find much by way of strongly documented evidence. Take a look at the link off the page to the BBC website. This doesn't offer sources either but at least it talks about localities and timescales. You go and look for some references? 'Private venture' schools of the kind prevalent before compulsory education were often small and ephemeral organisations - often a former clerk, defrocked curate, limbless ex-NCO or a hard up scholar using a room in a cottage/. Fees were paid by the week and children could be and often were withdrawn at short notice to go to work, go to the school down the road etc. The curriculum was generally up for negotiation at any point. (Have you seen the depiction of the hedge school in Brian Friel's play Translations? That sort of thing.) For many parents, the point of sending their kids to school was for them to learn English, the Imperial tongue. My view is that this is why they endorsed corporal punishment - they didn't want to waste their money. It's anachronistic to view corporal punishment in schools in the C19th as being unusual, even if we think it's reprehensible today. C19th society was very violent. Servants, apprentices and junior workers all got thrashed by their superiors. I think Welsh nots provide plausible evidence of feelings of cultural inferiority in Welsh communities. The reading that it's all the fault of the evil English just isn't very plausible. Anglicization preceded state schooling rather than following it. The Welsh Board of Education was established in 1907, its civil servants were in fact fairly sympathetic to the language and were faintly embarrassed that their views about Welsh in education were in generally in advance of popular opinion on the teaching of the language. Perhaps it's hard for Welsh people to admit to this cultural cringe now because Welsh identity is resurgent. And a good thing too. By the way, I am Welsh (I've even voted Palid Cymru - my MP's trying to impeach Blair) and I'd like to do my little bit for the language by being clear and accurate about why it declined. If you'd prefer an account of C19th Welsh history with clearly defined goodies and baddies I'd suggest the novels of Alexander Cordell. Please feel free to bung in your observations about the use of nots in other contexts (with appropriate references of course). As I said, I was thinking about cross referencing the article with something about social stigma.

Roger

You obviously have very strong feelings about this. Taking your points in order:

• Pre-1891 sources of data. The first 3 censuses showed: 1891 54.5%, 1901 50.0%, 1911 44.7% of Welsh speakers in Wales as a whole. The trend is clear enough. And 54.5% is a majority, even after the enormous English immigration into SE Wales in 1860-1890. Pre-census sources are summarized in Dot Jones, Statistical Evidence relating to the Welsh Language 1801-1911,UoW Press, 1998, ISBN 0-7083-1460-0; G H Jenkins (ed) The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, UoW Press, 1997, ISBN 0-7083-1418-X, and G H Jenkins (ed) Language and Community in the 19th Century, UoW Press, 1998, ISBN 0-7083-1467-8. In particular, a very good statistical survey by Ravenstein about 1871 showed 71.2%. Only the industrialised areas had "mixed" populations: in other areas the proportion of Welsh speakers was either 0-5%, or 95-100%. In 1801, the historically English-speaking areas (South Pembs, the Gower Peninsula, the vale of Glamorgan, SE Gwent, Radnor, SE Montgomery, Denbigh east of Wrexham, Maelor, coastal Flint) amounted to about 15% of the population of Wales - hence the 85% figure for pre-industrial Wales. Admittedly the figure might have been slightly lower 300 years before, when the Englishries were larger. But we're splitting hairs here; the point is, Welsh has only been a minority language in Wales in the 20th century.
• Wales didn't exist before the late 19th century. Yes it did - it's that bit sticking out the side of Britain - it's been there since the Devonian.
• Lack of Evidence - I agree entirely. That's why the article should be entrusted to somone who does have the evidence. No evidence, no article. What is the point of an article, the purpose of which is to explain the term to someone, but which simply says there was no such thing. Even if the term is purely an artifact of the mass imagination (which it plainly is not), it still exists, and NPOV requires that it be described "as imagined", without editorialising.
• Palid Cymru - a Freudian slip, perhaps.
• I agree with your opinion about Alexander Cordell: he was a writer of penny-dreadfuls, not a historian. No-one seriously interested in Welsh history would read such rubbish.
• Being clear and accurate about why the language declined. An admirable aim, on which a great many academics are currently working. The accuracy of a statement is the degree to which it is congruent with the objective truth. Read the above references for some clues to this. No-one is suggesting that the "Welsh not" was "responsible" for language decline: if it had been universally applied (instead of just in areas where language was an "issue") and if it had been at all effective, then Welsh would be extinct by now. Nor is anyone suggesting that it was an instrument of the English state - the English, then as now, couldn't care less about the Welsh language. The point is, then as now, whether Welsh people care about it.

LinguisticDemographer 23:07, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Weasel Words

Thanks to SilkTalk's breaking the logjam here, I have removed remaining contentious propositions, and added a bit of (hopefully neutral) text and a reference, and so the {weasel} tag can come out, I hope. There's plenty of scope for re-expanding this article, if anyone has well-sourced examples of the use of the Welsh not. The BBC website is definitely NOT a good source! LinguisticDemographer 00:09, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Weasel words seem to be a big issue in this small article. Worse still, there's a bogus footnote to the comment "In the later decades of the 19th century, education was compulsory but the Welsh "not" was used only in a minority of schools, and after the school boards were absorbed by the county councils following the Local Government Act 1888, instruction in Welsh in elementary schools became the norm in Welsh-speaking areas." - Page 455 of Davies' A History of Wales doesn't substantiate this remark. All Davies mentions in this regard is:-

"To a certain extent, Welsh had been employed in the elementary schools before 1889; it is unlikely that the use of the 'Welsh Note' was as widespread as the mythology of the twentieth century maintains. Nevertheless, in most of the schools of Welsh-speaking Wales there were pupils whose main experience of education was a mechanical drilling in a language which they did not understand..."

It goes on to explain (p. 456), that the informal use of Welsh was largely only used in the process of teaching children English, and this was the only point of leverage available to The Society for the Utilisation of the Welsh Language (formed in 1885) for their campaigns directed at the education system.

As a matter of fact, Davies in his only other reference to the 'Welsh Note' (as he refers to it) on page 652 of his A History of Wales, squarely cites it has having been accountable to and on the conscience of the British state.

The editing of this article implies that Welsh medium schooling was broadly sanctioned - a nonsense considering the first designated Welsh Medium School didn't come about until 1947, in Llanelli. Homoproteus (talk) 12:17, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Hmm...

The article implies that the Welsh Not would have been gone by the beginning of the 20th Century or so. In August 2003 I visited St Fagans National History Museum, where there is an example of a Welsh Not. An elderly lady (60s or 70s) became tearful, recalling that it had been used in her own school, and on her. I know this is not "proof", but perhaps there are other personal stories of this kind? Gwaka Lumpa (talk) 11:32, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I was born in 1946 in Neath, South Wales, and went to a primary school in that town. I can recall being smacked for speaking Welsh in school (I was probably around five years old at the time) and being told that Welsh was "dirty" and nice people spoke English - so the Welsh Not may have gone by then, but the active suppression of our language certainly had not! Emartuk (talk) 16:28, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I have a very different experience. I was born in Cardiff in 1948 of Welsh English-speaking parents. I attended a primary school just outside Cardiff and we had weekly Welsh lessons from a lovely teacher called Mrs George. She taught us the National Anthem and the Lord's Prayer in Welsh, also a number of hymns and traditional songs, all in Welsh, which we performed at our St David's Day concert. At all times we were encouraged to be proud of Wales and the Welsh culture. Mrs George also gave us a good grounding in the basic grammar and vocabulary of the Welsh language and went I went up to secondary school in Cardiff in 1959, this stood me in good stead - we had Welsh lessons alongside Maths, English and History etc. Once again, all the beauty of Welsh culture was made available to us. A number of my classmates went on to take Welsh at O-level, but unfortunately languages have never been my strong point so I did not. However, I can still remember every word of the Anthem, the hymns and songs I learned (and can still recite the Lord's Prayer) and also bits and pieces of vocabulary. I shall always be so grateful to Mrs George and our enlightened teachers for giving us this knowledge of our beautiful language and an enduring pride in the culture and history of Wales. I wish that all Welsh children could have shared this and I am very sorry that Emartuk and the lady referred to by Gwaka Lumpa had such sad experiences. I thought it would be worth speaking about my experience to illustrate that some of us have been very fortunate in this regard and that there is another side to the coin. (Honeybunch44 (talk) 10:08, 5 March 2014 (UTC))

Wikipedia bans personal experience posts and forum-type material for a number of reasons. Can you think what they might be?

No? OK, I'll give you some ideas.

I have it on good authority from a number of people who were subjected to the late 20th century Welsh education system, that the boot is now very much on the other foot. Some children are sent to Welsh-medium schools against their will, and these English-speaking children are then subjected to humiliating punishments (litter-picking etc - they don't seem to have reintroduced the cane just yet) if they should accidentally use their mother tongue in their own free time. (lunchbreak etc).

So the Welsh Not is back... just it's the English Not now.

There's at least one source for this, though... about younger English-speaking schoolchildren not being allowed to go to the toilet because they didn't yet know how to ask for it in Welsh. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:48, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

I'm not seeing a source, only a claim. On a personal basis "boohoo the poor oppressed conquerors" fails to move me in any way shape or form. On an academic basis you are trying to do a tu quoque to justify what? Justifying edits to claim the beau role for the magnanimous, enlightened anglosaxons? The main justifications to reject the existence of the welsh not amount to personal opinion pieces by people with rosy eyed views of Britain (forgetting that there was nothing willing about the marriage of the last britons to England). Which is more or less what your claim on "the english not" amounts to. 173.176.137.97 (talk) 11:57, 19 December 2014 (UTC)