Madam,

With friends like Margaret Hall (Likely thread of translation was lost) neither Ms Saville Roberts, Plaid Cymru MP for Dwyfor Meirionydd and leader of the Plaid Cymru group in Westminster, nor the Welsh language need enemies.

For Margaret Hall is saying that our esteemed MP is capable of using words and phrases that her constituents are wholly unfamiliar with - at a hustings, where direct clear communication with the public is paramount.

Equally how could Margaret Hall think that anyone would see Welsh as spoken in Gwynedd as somehow simple.

In fact the attempts to streamline Welsh, by the so-called educated and the media, have resulted in a simplified and impoverished language.

Worse still, some of the university language schools have so developed their own posh vernaculars, often involving affected sounding pronunciations and wholly invented grammatical forms, that we should not be surprised to find that even the alumni of one university find the alumni of other universities occasionally close to incomprehensible. The universities charge huge sums to teach this invented language to middle-class English students who can afford it.

That pretentiousness seems to be the source of the loss in translation to which Ms Dakin’s earlier letter (Is second-language Welsh suited to the north?) refers. Welsh as a second language is taught here in Gwynedd by tutors, in the main native speakers, who, rightly, avoid all such conceits.

Yours etc,

Don Russell, St John’s Hill, Barmouth

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