So here I sit, fingers poised, ready to type…but why?
All in all, life’s pretty good. Graduate education, a job i enjoy, a home that’s too good and partner who loves me. Idyllic, you’d say? Well I’d be tempted to guess that I’m not the only one enjoying the bounties of such a life. In fact, I’d wager that a vast majority of you are currently reaping the rewards of such an existence.
And yet, as bountiful as paradise may be, it could always be a bit more bountiful, couldn’t it?
It’s true isn’t it? Whenever we acquire something, whenever we achieve something new, no matter it’s significance, there’s always that voice pushing forward, telling that we want more! Now this is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, far from it. We only need look at society, our capitalist economy, to realize that this world was built on wanting more. It’s a fact of life, a quirk of existence.
We’ve all got a hunger for more, a hunger for change.
However, despite my apparent megalomania, I am not here to validate your hidden desire to leave your family or tell your bosses to go fuck themselves. No, I advocate change, not being a prick. This is precisely why i launched Artisaniaeth.com, so that I could stray away from the familiar world of pizza chef, and have a reason explore culinary avenues that I’d normally never see. However, as I write and publish more and more content to the site, with the workload ever mounting, I see an impasse on the horizon:
Is there room for welsh on the internet?
and if so, is the change to bilingual content too big a burden for lone creators?
Snapchat, Twitter, Vines and Vlogs. With so many social media outlets springing up almost daily, it seems that everyone, from your old school friend (hint hint) to massive mega-corporations are all trying to jump onto the same band wagon to get their message out there. Only thirteen year late to the party, S4C have even taken to publishing online to try and break through into that long sought after under fifties demographic, with their online channel; Hansh
False cynicism aside however, Hansh is doing extremely well. With nearly 12,000 likes on their Facebook page, internet personalities such as Gareth, DJ Bry a Sgrameer are quickly becoming household names through our Facebook feeds (at least in this little corner of North Wales). Clearly the demand is there for Welsh online content, and it’s this demand that I want to address with Artisaniaeth.com. Having said that, it is difficult to envision how one man can tackle the challenge of regularly uploading accessible, high quality Welsh content, having not put a Welsh word to paper in almost 8 years.
The Eisteddfod Isn’t Won Down the Pub
Yes, you read correctly. Since leaving school back in 2012, my relationship with Welsh, whilst still having fared better than many of my friendships from back then, is purely verbal, an oral relationship if you will. Despite earning an A* in Welsh Language and Literature at GCSEs, that was in 2010, and as painful as it is to say it, it feels like that star came with an expiration date. Like an old car that’s just sat still for decades, my A*’s gotten rusty, and who knows if she’ll ever be cruising again.
What this means, is that a bilingual site will be a lot o additional, unnecessary hard graft. Why, in that case, should I even bother doubling my workload so disproportional to please a minority audience? Especially when this minority is already used to an English language browsing experience?
Is this not the question, that’s been asked of us Welsh for centuries now? That the language has no use, that it’s impractical and that it has no need for existence in light of the universality of the English language. Yet the Welsh language persists, evolving all the while. Why?
Perhaps, in the end, it’s evolution that holds the answer.
Neuroscience of the Welsh Language
Life finds a way
as the saying goes, and so does language apparently. The stark parallelisms between language and biological life cannot be ignored. So long as a single organism lives on, it’s likely to survive, and thrive, regardless of environment, exactly like a language, who’s only requirement for multiplying is that someone can speak it so others can learn. After all, language, at it’s most fundamental, is biological. Nothing but a bundle of neurons in our brains, wired together, such that we’re capable of receiving, comprehending, processing and outputting audio, linguistic information.
To go one step further, let’s think about the self, what makes you, you.
If I were to ask you:
“Where is the seat of consciousness? Where exactly do you exist?”
what would you say?
For most of us, religious and philological quandaries aside, we’d argue that we exist somewhere in our heads, just behind our eyes, inside our brains. But where in the brain do you exist, could we take you out of the brain, or is our consciousness simply the sum of our parts? We certainly wouldn’t consider losing a limb or swapping a kidney as making us less ourselves, so where exactly is the line that separates us from our bodies, once we start chipping away at ourselves.
You may argue that the self is contained neatly inside our brains. But what about our eyes? They are connected directly to the brain, and thus could be considered a part of it. However blindness, or loss of functionality, is not considered damage to the brain, and it does not bring with it a change of the self. But what if we kept losing senses? Sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste, the more we lose, the closer we get to what we’d defined as a vegetative state, and yet, if the brain survives, we’d still call it consciousness.
Only when we start rooting around in the brain itself do we see true change to personality. Taking bits out of the brain would cause loss of self, but to achieve true change of self, we need to rewire the brain. Only by scrambling the neural pathways, altering your association of different concepts and ideas, would we see a change in self come about. What then, does this entail for the way we process language?
It’s been observed in bilingual adults, that brain activity for two separate languages will occur in spatially separate parts of the Broca’s Area, meaning that the brain has two distinctly separate neural networks for producing thought and speech in both languages. Does this mean that with different neural pathways connected to the different language centers, that the brain is essentially ‘switching circuits’ when we switch language, analogous to operating a completely rewired brain when speaking in one language over another.
Whether this constitutes a personality shift when we change language, I can’t tell you, that’s a question for smarter (wo)men than I. At the very least we can say that changing language is likely to change the context of any discussion being had. Our cultural and emotional history with that language pretty much ensures that an element of bias it applied to a subject via the very language used for discussion.It would therefore be folly of me to believe that I am so infallible that my view of the world is full colour, regardless of it’s English, or Welsh nature.
Seeing the World in Colour
So here I am, still sitting, fingers slightly less poised, even more reluctant to type?
I say this only because I’m now fully aware of inescapability of my situation. The site’s bilingual, it has to be. Though this means I’ve essentially doubled my already self imposed workload, made the road ahead twice as long, does it really matter if you’re already going nowhere.
Despite my written English being far superior to my Welsh, I want this to stand as proof that sometimes, the easy route, is not the most valuable. I could spend my days typing away half arsed blog entries and uploading repeat videos to an already over saturated English media space, or I can contribute to a Welsh online media space, a space desperate to be claimed as our own. To post Welsh content is to reclaim the internet, to use it as it was original intended, as a way of empowering us all, and not as some other tool handed down to us as an afterthought, to be treated as a gift from our benevolent English overlords.
Now is the time for Welsh media to shine, to take the next evolutionary step in language development. My job now is to drive, to drive my rusty old car, drive down this road to nowhere, and help drive the change that’s coming to Welsh online media.
