Cofi-wch...

-


Just a brief note tonight as I'm full of roast chicken, roast potatoes and gravy after a visit for an early supper with us by the boys, and I want to watch a documentary on the Jesus Army cult in half an hour [on terrestrial, if you're wondering about me having a scheduling issue]; some of us still use linear media, you know. I was wondering earlier about the relative sizes of the English and Welsh vocabularies, given that the largest Welsh dictionary I own is the slightly appropriately titled Y Geiriadur Mawr [literally The Big Dictionary], which consists - in my edition - of a single, albeit portly, volume. I know that the average daily vocabulary of English speakers is around 20,000 words out of a total of around 171,000 current usages and that the Oxford English Dictionary runs to twenty or so volumes; and so I wondered what the figures were for Welsh. The number of regular usages is pretty much the same at around the 20,000 mark, although the total number of current dictionary instances lies at around 100,000, so there must be a bigger Geiriadur out there somewhere [I just hadn't thought to look before now]. Anyway, it would seem that there is a sweet spot of between ten and twenty-five thousand words in daily use on average in both languages. I haven't really done anything other than a shallow sweep of the readily available online data, and given the risible Google AI summary's that were thrown up on my first couple of sweeps [which were wholly internally inconsistent], I think I'll hit the books instead. One thing I have learned after a lifetime here in Gogledd Cymru, is that the Caernarfon dialect of Cofi is an officially recognised linguistic variant of Welsh, which I never knew. You learn something new every day...

Comments

  1. Anonymous28 July 2025 at 14:44

    Of COURSE it is it's from Caernarfon!!
    JHS

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more