Bred of Heaven Read Online Free

and all of whom are proud of their country and its traditions, should tell the traveller where it begins.’ And with that, he motored into Wales.
    How do you learn Welsh?
    We’ve all had a go at a language. The Teach Yourself learning kits make it sound like assembling a toy aeroplane. Try our unique language-learning tool. Fluency always guaranteed. The common experience teaches us otherwise. Especially when our mother tongue is English. Built into the English-speaker’s psyche is a consensus that speaking in other tongues will not be necessary. English has long since usurped French as the international language of diplomacy; indeed it has deracinated itself and transmuted into something so universal as to be known as globish, an intercontinental mulch of patois and webspeak. If this is your birthright, why on earth speak anyone else’s lesser language? Let the mountain come to Muhammad. In the Microsoft Age, English is the thug in the playground, its bovver boot planted on the windpipe of vulnerable dialects and local lingos, starving them of air.
    But there’s one language which, despite a jolly plucky effort, English hasn’t quite managed to murder. As it was right next door, it should have been easy to rub out Welsh, just as it all but managed with Irish. Prevailing attitudes of the empire-bestriding Victorian towards ‘an antiquated and semi-barbarous language’ were enshrined in an infamous diktat penned in London. ‘The Welsh language,’
The Times
thundered in 1866, ‘is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence and the ignorance of English have excluded and even now exclude the Welsh people from the civilisation … of their English neighbours … The sooner all Welsh specialities disappear from the face of the earth the better.’ And so it was that the 1870 Education Act gave with one hand – free schooling for all Welshchildren – but took away with the other: the outlawing of Welsh in the classroom. Naturally the language pupils spoke at home and among themselves would trip inadvertently off many a junior tongue throughout the day. The first to do so would have a wooden tablet hung round their neck bearing the letters
WN
for ‘Welsh Not’. It would be passed from one miscreant to another until, at the end of the school day, the child who had possession of this instrument of linguistic oppression would be thrashed.
    â€˜
Welsh?!
’ says someone when I mention that I’m thinking of taking Bryn Terfel’s advice. Her face screws up into a twisted moue of distaste. Some things never change. Her eyes scrunch. Her cheeks pucker. Her mouth gathers into a tight, uncharitable little anus. I swear it’s involuntary. In that face is printed a millennium’s worth of accumulated hauteur. A plume of fiery wrath whooshes up somewhere in the furnace of my guts. I really ought to give her a thorough dressing-down, but I find that I’m too polite – too
English
– to do it myself. She admits, on being pressed, that she has never been to Wales.
    Yes, Welsh.
    These feelings are good, it occurs to me. If my knee-jerk reaction is to hate those who hate the Welsh, I must therefore be a little bit Welsh already.
    The old English joke about Welsh is the same as the one about Polish. It’s a language which, for whole sections of randomly juggled letters, seems to get by entirely without vowels. If you haven’t been walked through the rules and regs of the Welsh alphabet, it has the look of a sardine can of consonants. Vowels being the breath of a language, Welsh seems bafflingly to subsist without air.
    Even if native English speakers are not linguists, some are more inclined that way than others. I couldn’t do the sciences – yes, I hold my hands up: I flunked matrices and enzymes and all thatquantum stuff and guff. But I could always find my way around the floor plan of a new language. It was the kind of learning I was good at: