Bred of Heaven Read Online Free Page A

the shapes of words, their sinews and musculature, their etymological kinship with root languages, alliances with sister languages, their migrations and false friendships – this was the stuff that fired my curiosity.
    But the learning was all literary. We didn’t do much speaking in class, or not in the relevant language. We did reading instead. When I left school I could wade through Balzac and Molière in the original. But in France I could barely order myself a bowl of soup. Spanish and German I’ve basically forgotten. Then at eighteen I went away and for the first time tried learning a language by speaking it. To this day Italian is the comfiest fit. The experience taught me that the classroom is not the best place to pursue oral fluency. Or not the classrooms I was in.
    But old habits die hard. Just for starters, I decide to swallow a chunk of Welsh vocab. So one day, when I’m in Wales, I make my way to the back of
The Rough Guide to Wales
and hoover up their short glossary of useful terms. Being a guidebook, it mostly comprises boilerplate words and phrases for ‘good morning’ and ‘cheers’, ‘town hall’ and ‘bed and breakfast’ and ‘how much is that breathable windcheater in the window’? Many of them are familiar to all-comers from the bilingual signage you see everywhere in Wales.
Araf
for ‘slow’,
gorsaf
for ‘station’, in which
f
, it says here, is pronounced like a
v
. In
heddlu
(police) that double
d
is a hard
th
sound, as in ‘this’ or ‘thus’. Oh, but here’s the first curveball. That
u
,
The Rough Guide
advises, is actually pronounced
ee
. You basically have to treat it as an encryption. Like Cyrillic. Or music.
    In the guidebook there is also a list of topographical nouns. In any other language, you probably wouldn’t want to know how they say ‘mountain pass’, or not for the first couple of years. But morethan other languages I’ve learned, Welsh geography is written in the names on the signposts.
Llan
, to take the most in-your-face example, literally means an enclosed piece of land, though it has long since been taken to refer to the church found within such an enclosure. There are more than 600 Llans in Wales, from the modestly named Llan all the way through to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (which has two Llans in it).
Aber
, another prefix, means river mouth.
Pwll
means pool;
nant
, stream;
cwm
, valley;
melin
, mill, and
maes
, field. And so on. At Aberystwyth is found the mouth of the river Ystwyth. Porthmadog is Madog’s gate. Cwm Rhondda is the famous Rhondda Valley. And so on and on. The
w
in
cwm
, it turns out, is actually a double
o
, so there’s another vowel to add to the collection. Mountain pass, by the way, is
bwlch
.
    That’s fifty or so words in the bag without even breaking sweat. I buy a little red book, write them down and start to learn, like the good old days of O-level vocab. Welsh on the left, English on the right. That’s the way to do it. I tell myself it all seems quite easy.
    This facility didn’t take a direct route down the family tree. My father grew up in a bilingual environment. Welsh was the first language of both his parents. A Welsh-speaking grandmother lived with the family. ‘But English was the language of the house,’ he tells me. ‘I can remember driving round Carmarthenshire with my father visiting cousins on farms. My father spoke Welsh to them and I didn’t understand a word.’ How was it? ‘Very dull.’
    His older brother by contrast – my uncle – was linguistically attuned. Perhaps because he spoke only Welsh till he was three, he learned languages for fun, much as other boys play with train sets. It was a feature of our childhood, asking our uncle how many languages he spoke. The official tally settled on nine. We used to list them, starting with English as