{Truth in Cultures}[29th October 1988]

[Redbook6:26-33][19881029:1608]{Truth in Cultures}[29th October 1988]

19881029.1608

Cultural judgements are risky and liable to misinterpretation, and especially to charges of racism; but sometimes they thrust themselves upon you. For example, when we first came here to Wales, an Englishman who has lived and worked here for many years described Welshmen to us as ‘terrible liars’:* a judgement which [W] and I felt to be disgracefully made.

But now, a year to eighteen months later, we have been forced to admit to each other – and had longer-settled English neighbours confirm – a strange characteristic of our Welsh neighbours: that for all their insistence on the importance of everyone helping each other, when one offers or asks for help one rarely gets a straight answer.** There is, it seems, literally no word in Welsh for ‘Yes’.***

I can live with this: I see some of these characteristics in myself sometimes; perhaps my Celtic ancestry has something to do with it.

*[Meaning presumably not that they were bad at doing it, but that they did it a lot….]

**(One is supposed to know and do without asking, I suppose.)

***{So I [had] read, but this is incorrect.}

[It would be truer to say that there is not a single word in Welsh for Yes; there are several ways of saying it.]

[continues]

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