Noswaith dda, croeso a dathlu!

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International Mother Language Day (towards sustainable futures through multilingual education) .... is a bit of a mouthful, but I like the idea of UNESCOs day.

The idea for Mother language day is for all people to access education in their mother tongue and other languages, that local languages transmit cultures, values and traditional knowledge, and are important in sustainable futures... though I'm not sure what 'sustainable futures' are.

I do know from studying other languages that there are words that are untranslatable, and concepts that don't exist in English. On the other hand, English has considerably more words than other languages and has incredible detail in almost insignificant differences. The difference between freedom and liberty, for example. In many languages there is only one word, yet lacks words for concepts such as Spanish 'ganas' or Russian 'avos'. There are, I'm certain, words in languages spoken by only small groups of people that would allow us to describe new concepts, or in more detail.

English is my mother tongue, but in honour of today I have studied a little of the language my mother's mother spoke as a child. I have wanted to learn some Welsh for a while now but have never properly sat down and got to it. Today is no exception to that, but I did download a set of lessons and played them to and from work and will continue to do so for the next few days to see where I get to. This will be the fourth language I've learnt as an adult, so I hope it gets easier!

Tomorrow - St Lucian Independence and dancing a kwadril!

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