Welsh Course

Not a very lively group, is it? Anyone here (besides me) planning to attend the Cymdeithas Madog Welsh Course in July?

I'd love to attend Cymdeithas Madog... every spring I look at the application and sigh that I just don't have the time to go....

It's a good course, taught on seven levels, and packs a lot in a week.

Out of curiosity, how fluent are the people on this list?

I have a rather strange fluency. I have been studying the history and literature of medieval Wales as I get my PhD in medieval history. So I can read medieval Welsh nearly fluently, but I don't speak medieval Welsh because no one else does either. I am in the process of learning to read modern literary Welsh, because I need to read a lot of academic writing, and it's all in literary Welsh. But, of course, that's really different from the Welsh used in conversations and novels, and I don't read or speak that at all.

So I guess the short answer is, I'm most fluent in the least useful forms of the language. :)

Well, I originally wanted to learn Middle Welsh because of interest in the poetry & the Mabinogion, but could only find materials for modern spoken Welsh... so the end result is that my fluency gradient runs the opposite way, even though it's not what I originally intended. I am still plugging away sporatically at the literary language, because I have some academic books I'd like to read. ;-)

The Madog course focuses on modern spoken Welsh, although the top one or two levels grapple a bit with the written literary version as well.

You may have found these already, but there are two good websites to help with learning Middle Welsh:
http://canol.home.att.net/index.html - Reading Middle Welsh, by Gareth Morgan
http://heatherrosejones.com/medievalwelshlessons/index.html - a Medieval Welsh self-instruction course by Heather Jones

Thanks! I was aware of the Morgan site, but don't remember seeing HRJ's module before, although it doesn't surprise me that she has one ;-) I met her once on the Madog course, the year it was at Berkeley.

At this point my modern Welsh is getting good enough I can pick my way through some of the medieval stuff, rather like reading Chaucer. One of these years I'll buckle down and finish the job properly.

In the meantime, are you aware of any published grammar that deals with the language of the earliest poetry?