Speaking as a total outsider, I have a feeling that it was a marketing exercise, and fair doos, it seems to have worked. Anyone on here from Llanfair to confirm?
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@JohnYoung @robbruce @henddraig
The well-heeled English used to do a Grand Tour of Europe. From the mid-19th Century, this became hazardous as various nations revolted and/or unified and nationalism was on the rise. So they sought adventure closer to home - Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Thus began the mythology of the ‘noble savage’/Celt.
Anglesey did indeed take advantage with the invention of Llanfairpwll…llantysiliogogogoch, combining the names of two ‘parishes’ (llan) with some embellishments!
Likewise, the owner of The Goat Hotel in a small hamlet on the mountain road from Caernarfon to Porthmadog borrowed from Welsh legend to claim a link with Llŷwelyn as the resting place of his brave hound - Beddgelert.
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Ah, poor Gelert. I didn’t want to mention him.
I’m glad our own Swansea Jack was real (he saved a lot of people who had fallen into the River Tawe on various occasions)
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I did once come across another attempt in Wales for a long train station name - one that failed to catch on. I’ve been trawling google, but can’t find it again.
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Just a “technical” question : when I want to answer to a precise person, I clck on the “reply” button whicj is just under the post of this person (“reply to this post”) as it is usual in the forums. But for what I see is, my ansmer goes at the end of the topic, as if U had clicked on “reply to the topic” Then in my post I have to precise to whom I answer (for example “To Mamwlad” or “To Toffidil”. I don’t understand why it occures. Or is it that I should first click on “quote” ? (but normally it is not necessary)
I suppose I’m wrong, but where ?.. 
Diolch
Hi Brittany.
Even though it goes to the bottom of the thread, it will show a little hooked arrow with the persons name who you are replying to. If anyone wants to see which post you are replying to. they just need to click on that hooked arrow. Additionally, if you highlight something before you reply, that will also show as it has here.
I hope this helps - I am still working things out for myself.
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To @mcbrittany and @JohnYoung start typing their name as i have here. A choice will appear. click on the one you want. Quoting a post does much the same. Reply to a specific post should also signal on your Forum name icon when you enter the Forum.
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Apologies in advance for going on at length, but (deep breath) here goes:
Well, I guess Basque and Etruscan are ancient, in the sense that they’re both linguistic isolates, i.e. they separated from anything else that we have records of long enough ago that they’re no longer provably related to anything else in the world. (Although there are some hints of a possible Tyrrhenic group of languages related to Etruscan, e.g. the language of the Stele of Lemnos.)
And because they’re linguistic isolates they seem to bother people, somehow, and a lot of energy has been expended trying to find other things that they might be related to: oddly enough no-one seems to try the same trick with Sumerian, which is also an isolate – maybe because Etruscan was contemporaneous with Latin and Greek, so figures on our Western European cultural horizons, and Basque is still just about tenaciously hanging on in there, whereas Sumerian is just too far away and long ago; or maybe it’s just that because they invented writing we simply don’t have anything else from their unletterd contemporaries to compare it with!
But I think linguistic isolates bother us primarily because we’re used to the idea of languages existing in families. French speakers can look to other Romance languages, Welsh speakers to Cornish and Breton and Gaelic, English speakers to Dutch and even Danish (if they’re not too dazzled by Romance vocabulary) – even Hungarian speakers can look distantly at the Finns and Saami. And of course there were the great successes of nineteenth-century linguistics in reconstructing larger family trees, such as Indo-European, that helped to inspire Darwin in his work on the evolution of living organisms, too.
So linguistic isolates somewhat offend against our desire to make sensible patterns out of the world (people are people everywhere, so they must be related to/descended from somebody) and our knowledge and experience of how languages in Europe mostly work. But the thing is that modern Europe is not typical of all human culture, and the big language families so successfully reconstructed are mostly ones that have expanded massively during or a little before recorded history, often due to some discernible social or technical advantage: for example, Indo-European and the domestication of the horse (probably); Afro-Asiatic and nomadic pastoralism; and Bantu, whose spread is, I think, attributed to farming practices. Although there are arguments about the time-depth of some of these – and I think your views on some of them differ from mine – they clearly don’t have the same depth as something like the colonisation of Australia around 40 000 years ago, for instance.
And the thing is that languages, left to their own devices for long enough, will diverge until there is no longer any detectable, provable link between them. I was always puzzled by the existence of a number of linguistic isolates in the Americas, when the genetic evidence pretty clearly suggests just three waves of settlement by groups of people who presumably arrived from Beringia able to talk together perfectly well enough; but I guess it’s just a matter of time. Even in the case of Welsh and English we can find some pretty good examples, which without all the other Indo-European languages to compare them to one would never know were related – for example deg and ten, chwaer and sister, and dant and tooth are all pairs of identical words, unchanged in meaning, but unrecognizably altered in form.
I remember my partner saying that she used to be very fond of all the Jean Auel palæolithic novels – Clan of the Cave Bear and the like – and mentioning how their stone age characters roamed vast distances across Europe, managing to pick up the local dialect of what was assumed to be some vast, Europe-wide language wherever they went. But, apparently, this is hugely unlikely: prehistoric Europe is likely to have been much more diverse than modern Europe, including a fair old number of linguistic isolates (see this lovely but somewhat technical post on Language Log by Don Ringe, who is a Tocharian and Proto-Indoeuropean scholar).
But mentioning Darwin taking inspiration from linguistics, and then talking about things being altered beyond all recognition, does remind me of a beautiful biological object-lesson for us not to be too impressed by overt similarities (between languages or anything else). I only recently read in the news that they discovered about a decade ago that falcons are not actually related to hawks and eagles. DNA evidence strongly suggests they’re actually related to parrots. Pity we can’t fingerprint languages…
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Ah Ok Johh and Henddraig !!! Trugarezh, merci, diolch !!!
And what about the “bubble” next to the photo or avatar or the one speaking (writing) : sometimes blue, sometimes pink (or supposed red) : I thought maybe one colour for question, one colour for answer, but it does not match. So… any light for me ?..
Or don’t tell me it’s a question of gender !!! Blue for the boys, pink for the girls !!! Oh no…
(5 minutes later)
Sorry, I got the answer !..
You’ve seen a coloured tag on someone’s post, and you’re wondering what it’s all about… So here’s the deal… You have to start with PINK. If they have a PINK badge, it’s because they’ve said out loud a set of sentences they made up for themselves from a collection of prompt words - details here: The ‘5 Minutes’ Test Once you have PINK, you can move up to RED. If they have a RED badge, it’s because they then recorded those sentences on SoundC…
Helo @mcbrittany I’m a bit late coming to this thread but, looking back at your earlier question about pronunciation, the Welsh side of the Gweiadur on-line Welsh-English dictionary (https://www.gweiadur.com) has a useful feature allowing you to listen to how each Welsh word is pronounced - you just need to click on the 
symbol there
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Hi @johnwilliams_6 - I can never get Gweiadur to work - it says that I have to register, but that registration is closed, and if I try just ignoring that & searching anyway I it then says that I have sign in to see the record. I don’t know if @mcbrittany might not find the same, if she is, as I assume, not already registered.
History is my hobby rather than linguistics, but I am grateful for the information. However, although I began as a chemist and went into Health Physics, I worked with biologists and knew some involved with the entire Human Genome project, so was fascinated to learn that the raptors round here are actually parrots which, like certain apes, got a taste for meat, but unlike us, specialised in that direction! Of course, the mention of Galapogos finches reminds us that birds are excellent at turning their…er…beaks to any task able to provide them with an easier life. Then there is the fact that their ancestors, the dinosaurs were doing very nicely in virtually every niche until a certain asteroid messed up the entire planet!
p.s. I have always thought that the generalists will always end up ‘on top’ eventually in any situation simply because we can turn our main asset, brain power, to whatever problem arises!
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It’s funny to think how we would like that the “latest” dinosaurus" would be the crocodiles, just because they “look like”, but that we have to admit that the “latest dinosaurus” are the "pretty little birds (for my part, I think they look nice only in children books. Otherwise they look very unkind, no problem for me to imagine I’m in front of a mini (micro) velociraptor…
Abyway it’s funny, also (what funny moments, isn’t it !!!) to imagine, when we see bees, that they already were flying over there at this time (of the dinosaurus).
Then… maybe not so sure that WE (human) could survive to ANY problem… During a long time I thought we xould, but now I’m not so sure…
(as you see it’s not ab argumented post, nor " intellectual, I’m a dilettant, I like to hear about a lot of things, and try du follow…So surely I’ll say some stupidities : but shall appreciate to be contradicted !)
Have a nice sunday
MC
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Helo @RichardBuck - I have registered but admittedly it was 2 or 3 years back - it’ll be a great pity if registration remains closed. Just a fleeting thought - have you tried it using a different browser?
I have tried Gweiadur too, using both Micosoft Edge and Chrome. In both cases it says that registration is closed.
“This beta version of Gweiadur is currently open to a limited number of registrations. Unfortunately, this limit has been reached for now, but we will be increasing the limit shortly.”
I don’t know what they mean by shortly, but I tried several months ago with no success.
Sue
Helo @Betterlatethan @RichardBuck - I did a bit more delving and came across this message on the Gweiadur Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pg/Gweiadur/reviews/?ref=page_internal):
- I’m sorry that you haven’t been able to register for Gweiadur. You are correct that it is in beta version at the moment, and yes, we are in the process of improving it and adding more content and resources. As we are not funded by any external source, progress is slower than we would like it to be, and it is becoming more and more apparent that we will have to change the way the project is financed if we are going to keep up with demand. We hope to have an update for our users soon. Cofion gorau, Nudd
A pity - looks as if it’s likely to be a while yet before registrations are re-opened 
Is that a recent message? I had got the impression a month or two back that registration might have reopened, as the number of registrations reported at the bottom seemed to be growing again slowly.
Admit I haven’t kept track of that number in very recent weeks. It’s 4277 today (04.03.2018).
Not too long ago, i.e. early November 2017 but it seems to have been their most recent Facebook post