Geeklawyer has never been entirely sure why the Welsh are. Yes, Snowdonia is just the most gorgeous place, as is Bangor; and Aberystwyth was the scene of several joyous holidays of lost youth. Goodness even the South has its good bits. So Wales is a glorious place with wonderful views …
But it is despoiled by the retarded jealous spiteful bitter Hobbits who crawl on its surface: wart covered Homunculi whose loathsome existence is a foul, sulphurous wind in the nostrils of the fair English.
Sorry, got carried away, Geeklawyer was supposed to be ranting about Welsh language requirements. IPKat tells us that the three men and a sheepdog behind the campaign to reduce everything cast into writing in that poor benighted land into that bizarre pointless random collection of consonants known as Welsh.
Frankly Geeklawyer cannot see the point: the only person in Wales who can read, either Welsh or English, is a client of Geeklawyer’s and he is a Free Software fan and thusly not of mind to get patents. For everyone else it will be a bloody pointless exercise in providing a living for Welsh translators. Expensive and pointless. A bit like Geeklawyer really.
Geeklawyer recommends taking part in the consultation and letting the Patent Office know that this is so very very silly: at least if you must humour these bloody people let them make their application in Welsh and require them to pay for the sodding translation themselves, not the English taxpayer.
No offence intended to Welsh readers of course: you’re different.
And if that doesn’t get Geeklawyer some hate mail he will have to try harder.
As a graduate of the University of Wales (Priscol y Cymru if I recall correctly) I am reminded that part of the Students Union Charter, or some sort of rules, stated all notices must be in both English and Welsh.
Every year at the Union AGM some unknown leek eating fresher taff would stand up and complain that not all notices were bilingual. The chairmans response was probably on a laminated card “Thank you for that, your offer to translate official notices is accepted, I suggest you bring some welsh speaking friends”
My graduation ceremony was for me a high point in the use of dead languages, the half that was not in Welsh, was in Latin!
Shame about the rugby on Saturday.
Erin go Bragh
Latin while dead is interesting. It, unlike Welsh, is at the root, or a part, of many languages. I did do Latin at school but have forgotten nearly all of it. As a lawyer I have to deal with a certain amount of Latin but like most lawyers I misuse it badly in non-legal contexts; as a particularly accomplished lawyer I have acquired substantial skill in misusing English as well.
And if you are a interested in looking educated and intellectually superior a facility with Latin is indispensable. Welsh on the other hand has been proven to be a powerful carcinogen: uttering it will give you lip and oesophageal cancer. But since it’s only the Welsh who are victims no-one much cares.
Does Erin go Bragh mean “I have a leek, would you like to share my leek? it’s a nice leek, I really like leeks. We can cook it with sheep leg. Leek, mmmmm …”?
“Erin” is of course anglicized Gaelic, but for the Emerald Isle of Ireland, “go Bragh” roughly translate as “forever”, so roughly it means Ireland forever.
I was just trying to subtly point out that Ireland seemed to have done particularly well on Saturday (St Patrick’s Day) in securing second place in the Six Nations, as well as knocking Pakistan out of the World Cup Cricket Super 8. Now whilst England did not perform well against Wales (birthplace of St Patrick) in the Rugby, they do seem to be doing a little better in the Caribbean pedalo championships, where England and Wales compete as England.
But I forgot, you don’t always do subtle.
No, I can do subtle; but I don’t always do interested. I entirely missed the cricket & six nations. For a fan of Rugby this is an embarrassing admission but it is true: I haven’t followed any of the games. Oops!
Priddysgol Cymru if I remember my school Welsh correctly, which I almost certainly don’t.
When I become benevolent dictator of the world, knowledge of Latin or classical Greek will be a requirement for any public sector job. Sadly, lawyer-Latin doesn’t count, vile debased mediaeval thing that it is.
I tremble with fear at the thought of you as World dictator.
And your views of language have to be treated with huge suspicion since you are a Perl hacker.
Perl: the only language that makes Welsh look acceptable by comparison. Very very acceptable.
Pretty feeble and pointless. Makes Grannie Anne Robinson appear controversial.
Excellent! a bite. If only as little one. Thats two Taffies I know who can read and write.
You’ll get more than a bite if you drag yerself away from yer keyboard for a minute and visit Cardiff. Btw, is this yer most popular bog ever?
Dude–I’m part Welsh, and my 2nd favorite place in the UK is a spot on the Irish Sea near Caernarfon…Welsh people are, like WAC?, playful and feral. We just look a little funny. And we drink. And other stuff.
But Dan you’ve risen above it. Be happy you can visit somewhere beautiful like Caernarfon and leave with minimal contact with the woad covered inhabitants.
wales is a cultured nation that has given the english language useful words like ysbytai, which the ignorant english tongue renders as hospital. probably.
and … are you not worried that some interested parties may be effectively discriminated against by the spam filter requiring them to enter the sum of two single digit numbers? really - this blog should be more encouraging of diversity. i look forward to a slew of posts celebrating black history month.
and would evil dave care to rant on the abominable phrase ‘actus reus’.
I am consciously and unapologetically discriminating against the disnumic as they deserved to be driven from the face of the Earth.
I think I can get Evil Dave to rant but I’m not sure actus reus has sufficient bite; though as a classicist asserting that Latin is anything other than the fount of all virtue is probably a good start. I understand he is writing a lexical analyser for Perl with all the keywords replaced by Latin equivalents, though I understand ‘foreach’ and ‘redo’ are proving problematic.
‘I am consciously and unapologetically discriminating against the disnumic as they deserved to be driven from the face of the Earth.’
and you like an adverb. i think it has been proved somewhere that the welsh language invented adverbs - and had them nicked by the bloody english, naturally.
my concern at ‘actus reus’ is that it really doesn’t look like any latin i know. i can’t believe that such an obviously right-thinking chap as evil dave (mr cameron to us) can fail to be worried too.
hmm - notes nervous glances on faces of fellow law students as he removes shoes to answer spam protection question - do we count toes??? guesses at 13…
IMPORTANT: PLEASE NOBODY TELL ME WHAT PERL IS
Ah. Evil Dave has an entirely different meaning to me: Mr Cantrell, Geek, Perl hacker extraordinaire and commentator on this blog and his own http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal/index.pl.
Nothing to do with Cameron who isn’t evil so much as a
public relations exercise.
You can avoid answering spam question if you register as a user: it would be nice to have someone other than all the “getviagracheap@mail.ru” type registrations. I have to delete this and I’m getting a bit fucked off with it.
Perl is a computer scripting language. http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/perl/perlnut/ch04_01.htm. I use the word language in a technical sense only. It is a random collection of symbols which only the author and the computer can understand.
IMPORTANT: PLEASE NOBODY TELL ME WHAT PERL IS
is that so hard to understand??? are you charging me for that information? you don’t have that many posters you can start by hacking off a new one. or are you an uncaring radical? (that goes SO well with ip lawyer)
think i will register (now that’s a real techno challege for me) - i like being randomly abusive with you. also i want evil dave to be my friend so i can say ‘ah yes a friend of mine writes perl ya know…’
I am sorry SW, since Nobody didn’t deign to reply (that snotty git) I thought I’d try to be helpful.
First off - good blog, it’s nice to read some comment on the law that’s slightly more prepared to express an opinion (and is thus more interesting) than much of what I see from day to day.
Slightly disappointing, however, is a pop at the Welsh language - I’m assuming that it’s tongue-in-cheek, so I’m not rising to it (we, as the Welsh, do make it woefully easy for the English to take the piss about this subject - the spluttering you hear is probably not somebody trying to speak Welsh, it’s a Welsh speaker starting to froth at the mouth because something along these lines has got up his nose). On the subject, however; why *shouldn’t* things be bilingual? You wouldn’t get het-up about having to render things in French if you were in France, or German in Germany - what’s the difference here? Saying that ‘but you all understand English’ doesn’t cut it - so do most of the French and the Germans.
Could it be that Mr Geeklawyer’s reaction is coloured by a traumatic childhood memory of a bad experience with one of Aberystwyth’s copious Welsh weirdos?
And it’s ‘Prifysgol Cymru’. Nitwits.
your apols are noted and accepted, geekboy.
the cymraeg, however, will be less easy to pacify…the spirit of glyndwr lives on! (a westminster-trained lawyer just so’s ya know, as well as immortal messaiah)
My God you are an arse, but where to begin?
“Geeklawyer has never been entirely sure why the Welsh are.”
Since when do people need a reason to exist? Do the English have a reason to exist? Other than to frighten the rest of us with drunken football hooliganism?
“But it is despoiled by the retarded jealous spiteful bitter Hobbits who crawl on its surface: wart covered Homunculi whose loathsome existence is a foul, sulphurous wind in the nostrils of the fair English.”
Have you ever heard the phrase “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?” No? Then allow me to demonstrate:
Who exactly are the ‘fair English’ you’re talking about? All I see is a nation of fat, bald, overweight, badly-dressed, obese, greasy, pasty-faced, uneducated, xenophobic, homophobic, binge-drinking, emotionally repressed, middle-aged football obsessives dreaming of the distant glory days of the sixties (remember 1966?) or worse still their over-hyped empire which was responsible for the enslavement of millions of people and the deaths of many more. The ‘fair English’ that you refer to exist only in the pages of P.G. Wodehouse novels or worse still in overly sentimental Hollywood romance films, where the English is inevitable presented as a rich, bumbling, twit.
“Frankly Geeklawyer cannot see the point: the only person in Wales who can read, either Welsh or English, is a client of Geeklawyer’s and he is a Free Software fan and thusly not of mind to get patents. For everyone else it will be a bloody pointless exercise in providing a living for Welsh translators. Expensive and pointless. A bit like Geeklawyer really.”
Frankly Geeklawyer doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about, and furthermore hasn’t realised that referring to oneself in the third person sounds moronic (there’s a reason why Tarzan does it after all). The reason why the legislation to promote the Welsh language is needed is that the number of Welsh speakers had been declining for decades, however the introduction of this legislation has led to the first increase in the number of Welsh speakers for the best part of a century. The legislation has created an economic need for Welsh language skills and is a shining example of capitalist markets being used to promote and increase cultural diversity.
You may dress up your comments in pithy, witty language, but frankly prejudice is still prejudice no matter how you present it, and this pathetic, racist little rant of yours deserves to be treated with contempt.
“All I see is a nation of fat, bald, overweight, badly-dressed, obese, greasy, pasty-faced, uneducated, xenophobic, homophobic, binge-drinking, emotionally repressed, middle-aged football obsessives”
“…this pathetic, racist little rant of yours deserves to be treated with contempt…”
I am confused, which racist were we talking about?
‘Have you ever heard the phrase “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?” ‘
You have, but apparently is slipped from your memory in between writing three paragraphs: how long did those paragraphs take you? Did the crayon break?, Mr Goldfish memory.
Glad you liked it it though, I had you in mind - peace out