Correct my Welsh

Well, not my Welsh…

This popped up at M & S at the self service till. So before I email them, there’s not some esoteric grammar rule at play here, is there?

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haha - well spotted!
no, no esoteric rule. I’d go with Iawn (capital I) being mistaken for lawn (lowercase L) then getting ‘re-capitalized’ to an uppercase L. Easily done in certain typefaces (such as the one we’re using here! :wink: )

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That’s a very common error when you’ve got people transcribing letter-by-letter to and from Welsh who don’t understand the language. Someone with even GCSE second language would have noticed that, but I suspect it was input by some poor underpaid office drone in London.

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… or did they make the Bag for Life from recycled lawn clippings?

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The i / L has annoyed so so much for many years in so many fonts (see I even have to use one in caps to make it clear), what is the point of making two letters look like exactly the same as each other?

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I nearly always write capital “I” with bars at top and bottom to remove any ambiguity. And I try to put a curl on the lower case “l”, too.

But clearly the translator is not very familiar with Welsh (or familiar at all). My mind must be in Welsh mode already, because I didn’t see “Lawn” = (English) Garden, firstly. I saw (Welsh) “Lawn” = (mutated) “Llawn”, meaning “Full”, and wondered why the checkout was asking about a full bag at the start of scanning :smile:

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On a slightly more depressing note, I noticed that most of the Welsh had disappeared, last time I visited Tesco in Broughton, Flintshire, a few strides away from the English border at Chester. I did once point out a spelling mistake in their signs, but I suspect that they could not find anyone able to do the job correctly. Instead of corrected Welsh, I returned to find removed Welsh. :disappointed:

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There was at least one early computer virus/malware that exploited this confusion in order to use humans to help it spread.

Basically, you’d get an email from a friend telling you about some security problem with Windows that required an updated .dll (“dynamically linked library”) to fix; said .dll purported to be attached, but was actually the malware itself, using an otherwise novel .dil suffix, spelt with a capital ‘i’. The default Windows font made this indistinguishable to the eye from the real thing (like modern phishing sites using exotic Unicode characters that look just like Roman-alphabet letters), and we had all already learnt that Windows needed continual fixing (without having yet learnt to only trust such fixes direct from Microsoft), so people happily installed their own viruses and forwarded them in a well-meaning way to their friends :slight_smile:

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yes, I read it that way first too! :joy:

I have never seen a checkout like that in any language. Our ‘supermarket’ is a medium-sized Co-op with no such strange devices, so I was a tiny bit bemused by the whole thing! Also, for years I wrote capital ‘i’ with a curl on top and lower case ‘L’ like ‘l’. But then I crossed my z and my 7!!

The official name of the store is Tesco Broughton Chester Extra. I’m pretty sure that there will be plenty of people in the Tesco hierarchy who don’t even know that it’s in Wales.

In some fonts I find it hard to distinguish between lower case “r” followed by “n” (without a space), and the letter “m”.

Not sure if it’s bad font design or bad implementation or what (or partly) my eyesight, but it can be confusing.

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yes, me too - got to be especially careful with a word like b u r n :joy:

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giggling muchly!! :laughing: :smile: :wink:

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I’m a member of an online community that often uses the pomodoro technique to tackle projects from writing essays to housework. People tend to abbreviate it to p o m with unfortunate results if you don’t read carefully. :blush:

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Another strange thing I have noticed (not an error as such) is the use of the English word for Welsh instead of Cymraeg. In my local library in Dulwich, London, the language choice is Espanol, Deutsche, Welsh (not Cymraeg!) etc. Not complaining but some interesting psychology going on there. I went to a McDonalds down the Old Kent Road in Peckham a few months ago and I think (but not sure) that the automatic ordering machine did the same.

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Do you know the Dafydd Iwan son, Cân yr Ysgol?

"…ond yn yr ysgol mi ges
Lessyns History
Lessyns Geography
Lessyns Inglish
O hyd ac o hyd
ac ambell i lessyn yn Welsh

  • chwarae teg
    am mai Cymro bach oeddwn i"

:wink:

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