[unofficial weekender] Friday dudes!

[limburger 21711xp 1]

@blinky465 I’m sure all of it makes sense if you’ve learned the language, but it does look alien.
Got enough problems trying to remember that ‘Leicester’ should be pronounced as ‘Lester’ if I remember correctly.

@woldenspoons

How the heck do you go from ‘Llan’ in Llanfairfechan to ‘Clan’ ?
The rest of it sort of makes sense … (fair = vair, fech = vek and ‘an’ =  ‘an’)
I also feel like that k = more a ‘g’ like sound …

[woldenspoonsParticipant 3557xp 2]

LL in Welsh us always CHL sound. For example I live in Llandudno. The other trick is letters changing sounds from what you expect. So it is clan did no.
@limburger.

Oh well another week till I do any hobby. ☹️

[blinky465 17028xp 2]

@woldenspoons – that’s  Llan – DID – no, right? 😉

My nephews are native Welsh speakers and tell me that Welsh is – apparently – a very “phonetic” language; you just need to know what the phonemes are – they’re not the same as many other (European) languages! It took me a while to get the LL sound right (it’s a “soft” sound – not at harsh as “cl-” you sort of bite the sides of your tongue, smile widely and “hiss” the sound out of the sides of your mouth).

Living in Llangollen (or, Lan-gow-len as our US visitors would insist) we’d often hear tourists reading Croeso i Cymru as “crow-esso ik-cim-roo” and I guess it makes sense, until you learn y is u, and u is i (so phonetically, said “croy-so ee cumri” but even this isn’t a perfect explanation – there are “long vowels” and “clipped vowels”, which is impressive for a language where, as @limburger suggests “vowels go to die”). To this day, I’m not entirely sure how to pronounce Betwys-y-Coed (it changes, depending on who I’m talking to, and how *they* say it!)

Sometimes there aren’t enough vowels in Welsh words. Sometimes there are far too damned many to choose from!

[woldenspoonsParticipant 3557xp 2]

For anyone looking for a nice break in the future Betws Y Coed is beautiful and well worth a stay.

So our hobby pledges this week was to learn about Wales then? Lucky ducks.

[sundancer 42985xp 1]

Welcome to the new week.

I started my Monday with a flat tire on the car because somebody left a nail on the road…

…is it Friday yet?

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

I used to love riding up the A5 on my motorbike and remember Betws-y-Coed as being particularly beautiful – but a lot of the scenery around that area is stunning (the run from Llangollen, Corwen, Cerrigydrudion and on to the Conwy Valley is amazing). Keep going on towards Snowdonia and it gets a bit to “big and bleak” for me, but you can always turn around at Betws-y-Coed 😉

@sundancer – what an absolute pain! Don’t worry – the way time works at the minute, it’ll be Friday tomorrow….

[sundancer 42985xp 1]

yeah I hope so. Thankfully it’s a small nail in the centre of the wheel so it’s fixable without replacing the whole thing. Still 40€ up in smoke :S

[limburger 21711xp 1]

@blinky465 knowing which letters make which sounds was also a big part of English lessons …

‘The’ I still hate because it is this vague nothingness that still exists.

Then again … we get to have fun when foreigners try to speak Dutch so I guess everyone gets to suffer equally.

Fun fact : my local dialect shares sounds with the Chinese language
There have been songs that abused the fact just for fun…

 

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

I think it’s the part that’s missing from the “foreign language” lessons we’re given here in the UK (I mostly learned French from a series of Michel Thomas CDs after leaving). And it seems to be a mostly english-speaking problem: there’s an inate inability to understand that the same letters are pronounced differently in different languages.

We’d regularly be given books to read from, and pronounce everything in clipped English vowels, then patted on the head and told “very good” simply for having had a go at it. It was years after leaving school that I learned that the letter “i” in French, for example, is pronounced “ee”. Or that “e” is “uh” or “é” is “ay” etc. It’s no wonder my neighbours struggled to understand me when I first started visiting the area we eventually moved to! (the greatest compliment I received was being recognised as a “country yokel” when we went to visit Paris after living in the Loire for 12 months).

@limburger – are those the words being sung in that video? I can’t even begin to put the words I can hear to the words on the screen!

[limburger 21711xp 1]

@blinky465 yep … they’re about 90% correct. I noticed that the sound quality is pretty bad for this one so that makes it even harder to understand for outsiders. It is as close to the written spelling as you’re likely to get given that there is no real official spelling or grammar. Like any dialect it is something you sort of absorb.

I think part of the reason is that 90% of the world and the media you consume are in English so you don’t have a need to understand foreigners. And most foreigners will adapt to you.

For us it is the other way around as we need at least one secondary language. Kids get taught English when they’re practically fresh out of kindergarten. I think primary school ? I only learned it when I was a few years older, but we did have German and French language lessons as well (I was glad I could drop French after the 1st year though).

German was the easy part as we watched a lot of German tv (including some of their dialect shows).

I think it helps that the Dutch language has borrowed a lot of foreign words so we’re sort of used to some of the pronounciations.  I do have to say that it annoys me how easily we borrow English words when there are perfectly normal Dutch words. I bet you would be able to recognise a lot as a visitor …

[rayzryrParticipant 22410xp 0]

@bali thanks man! I’m really looking forward to painting the ruin. There’s more to the set too, it makes a small tower all together.

@blinky465 yep, sure is 3d print. Printable Scenery’s Shadowfey set. I’ve managed to cover most of the banding, a little always shows through. With some thoughtful painting, it should make it less obvious. But from gaming distance, we’ll probably not notice it anyway 😀

My Monday night D&D session was cancelled when one player realised he had other commitments… namely, he wasn’t going to be in the same state as the rest of us! So we played Kingdom Death instead. One of our former D&D group was able to join us. Knowing he was keen to try it out, we got a new campaign started. He wasn’t disappointed, especially when his character was mauled to death by the starting Lion.

[rayzryrParticipant 22410xp 2]

A little work this evening.

Leather armour and boots, and the green robes and cloak. The eyes, though not 100% happy with them. The gold wings at the shoulders.

 

[limburger 21711xp 1]

‘not happy’ he says … bloody hell dude.

I hope to get to that level one day …

I think the shoulderpads shouldn’t be too bright. There’s a risk that it might drown the rest of the colour scheme if you make that gold too shiny.
Maybe a bit more ‘bronze’ like ?

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 1]

The name of the country in Welsh makes a bit more sense when you realise that the Latin name for Wales is Cambria. Cymru is pretty close to that… Wales is a similar root to Wallachia in Romania and basically mean ‘land of the foreigner’ in old English…turns out we English have always been dicks to everyone. 😛 People don’t think of the Welsh as being ‘Romanised’, as the saying goes, but they were. Also three geologic time periods are named after Wales! The Cambrian, obviously, the Silurian (named after an ancient Welsh tribe), and the Ordovician (named after another tribe). Just more useless facts I have in my head for you all!

In hobby news, work continues on the Panzer IV. One track left to paint, then we can add decals and weathering… I tried an experiment with Contrast paints for the metal and it worked out quite well…though the Black Templar does overpower the metal a little too much, I find. Long story short, I went with a basecoat of Leadbelcher on the machine guns and tracks, then contrasted with black over the guns and Wyldwood over the tracks to give them that brown look they have. I might need to ad a touch of Leadbelcher over the top of the tracks, but I like the overall look.

[danlee 22443xp 2]

I’ve finished this week’s pledge. https://www.beastsofwar.com/project/1593676/

 

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