English and Welsh facts for kids

"English and Welsh" is the name of a special talk given by J. R. R. Tolkien on October 21, 1955. In this talk, Tolkien shared his ideas about how people's backgrounds, ethnicity, and language are connected.

When Was It Published?

This talk was first printed in a book called Angles and Britons in 1963. Later, it was published again in a collection of Tolkien's essays called The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays in 1983.

What Did Tolkien Talk About?

Tolkien started by explaining words like "British", "Celtic", "Germanic", "Saxon", "English" and "Welsh". He explained that the word "Welsh" comes from an old word, walha.

How Languages Met: English and Welsh

Tolkien also talked about how the English and Welsh languages have influenced each other. This has happened since the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, when people from Anglo-Saxon lands came to Britain.

• He mentioned Welsh words that are now used in English.
• He also spoke about how Welsh might have influenced the basic structure of English.
• On the other hand, he noted that many English words are now used in Welsh.

Tolkien compared how sounds change in Germanic languages (like English) and Celtic languages (like Welsh). He said that the languages in northwest Europe are very connected.

The north-west of Europe, in spite of its underlying differences of linguistic heritage – Goidelic, Brittonic, Gallic; its varieties of Germanic; and the powerful intrusion of spoken Latin – is as it were a single philological province, a region so interconnected in race, culture, history, and linguistic fusions that its departmental philologies cannot flourish in isolation.

This means that even though there are different language families there, like Goidelic, Brittonic, Gallic, and various Germanic languages, and even Latin, they all form one big "language area." Their histories, cultures, and languages are so mixed that you can't study them separately.

The Beauty of Sounds: Phonaesthetics

In the last part of his talk, Tolkien explored the idea of phonaesthetics. This is about how beautiful certain sounds or words can seem. He used the phrase "cellar door" as an example. Many English speakers think it sounds beautiful, even without knowing its meaning.

Tolkien added that, for him, in Welsh, "cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent." This means many Welsh words sound as beautiful to him as "cellar door" does in English.

He explained that this feeling of beauty happens when you hear a word. You feel its style, and then you connect a meaning to it.

[T]his pleasure is felt most immediately and acutely in the moment of association: that is in the reception (or imagination) of a word-form which is felt to have a certain style, and the attribution to it of a meaning which is not received through it.

Tolkien believed that these tastes for language sounds might be something we inherit. He called this an "inherited taste" for language. He used the term "native tongue" to describe this inherited taste, which is different from "cradle tongue" (the language you learn as a baby).

How This Talk Was Important

Tolkien noted in his lecture that "Most English-speaking people … will admit that 'cellar door' is beautiful, especially if dissociated from its sense and from its spelling. More beautiful than, say, 'sky', and far more beautiful than 'beautiful' … Well then, in Welsh, for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent." This interest in and love for the Welsh language influenced his own invented languages. A good example is the Elvish language Sindarin, which he created for his stories.

This lecture is seen as Tolkien's "last major learned work." It has several important points:

• It helps us understand the role of the ancient Britons in England during the Anglo-Saxon period.
• It warns against harmful ideas about different human groups.
• It introduces Tolkien's idea that people might have an "inborn" taste for certain language sounds. This leads to his thoughts on what makes language beautiful.
• Finally, it gives a correct idea about where the word "w(e)alh" came from. This helps explain what happened to the Celtic language when the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain.