A Greek lady by the name of Nana Mouskouri singing “Ar Hyd y Nos” which in English is “All Through the Night”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr28JGnQHbY
I am reliably informed that this Greek lady’s pronunciation of the Welsh lyric was word perfect - she could teach the English how to do the same not that any of them could either get to grips with the correct pronunciation, or more significantly, even bother to try in the first place. If there is one thing which pisses me off massively is the way the English at large do not even try to pronounce either Welsh or Scottish place names even remotely correctly - indeed, many of them seem to think it amusing to mangle them up in their own stupid Sassenach way……much as I adore my English friends I am indulging in a bit of Sassenach bashing on this St David’s Day, in support of my Welsh brethren and fellow Celts:
These are the Welsh words sung by the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri:
Holl amrantau'r sêr ddywedant Ar hyd y nos Dyma'r ffordd i fro gogoniant Ar hyd y nos Golau arall yw tywyllwch I arddangos gwir prydferthwch Teulu'r nefoedd mewn tawelwch
Ar hyd y nos
One of the most irritating people I see on British TV is Anne Robinson, who hosts the "Weakest Link" show......she comes from Liverpool, which, after all, is only a stone's throw from Wales across the estuaries of the Dee and Mersey rivers and the intervening Wirral peninsula...in fact you can actually see the Welsh mountains on a clear day from any of the tall buildings in Liverpool city centre.
Yet Anne Robinson makes a point of ridiculing* Wales and Welsh people at every opportunity, and this was illustrated recently when she constantly failed to even remotely pronounce the name of one of the Welsh contestants correctly on a recent show.
The guy was called Geraint, a very common male name in Wales and anyone can learn to pronounce it correctly quite easily no matter from whence you come, but Robinson insisted on making a dog's dinner out of it, as did many of the English contestants appearing on that particular show.
The "g" is hard, as in "go" - so that's step No 1. The "r" is clearly enunciated, almost rolling, a feature of Welsh, and Scottish for that matter -in Welsh "r's" are never glided over as in English...step No 2.
Now for the "aint" bit - it is not prounced as the English "aint" - as in "paint" or "faint" - it is the same as the "int" in the English measurement "pint".
The stress in "Geraint" is on the first syllable, and NOT on the second, as stupidly, and indeed stubbornly, voiced by Robinson and those similarly silly English contestants appearing alongside this poor Welsh guy Geraint, who took it all in his stride, most probably because he was among English people in England, and like me he was aware how totally incompetent and indeed, quite often, totally disrespectful of any kind of foreign words and pronuncations many English people can be and quite often are.
So it's:
GERR-ine-t - with a hard "g".
God help any Sassenach ending up in Garndolbenmaen or Penrhyndeudraeth or Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, in Wales - or Glenquoich or Auchtermuchty or Lochgelly, up here in Bonnie Scotland.
;-)
*She may well do all the Welsh bashing thing a wee bit tongue in cheek tru enough, but it seems that slagging off anything Welsh is socially acceptable in a way that slagging off Muslims or black people simply is not, but who ever did say that PC was even handed anyway?