GAIMAN, uno de los pueblitos galeses en Chubut

GAIMAN, Provincia de Chubut, Argentina (estuvo alli ella...) Algunas capillas de Gaiman BETHEL BETHESDA SALEM BRYN GWYN NAZARETH (IN DROFA DULOG) Y un articulo interesante del dialecto que se habla en esos pagos ARGENTINIAN WELSH It seems that in Argentina there lives a community of Welsh immigrants who descend from some Welsh speakers who emigrated about a century ago and who speak a particular dialect known as Argentinian Welsh. These people hold a special and curious place in the culture of contemporary Wales, where the Welsh language had been in decline until about twenty years ago when a resurgence of Welsh nationalism led to a revival of the language. As a result, there has arisen a practice of what might be called linguistic tourism, in which people from Wales go and visit Argentina so that they might soak up what is, to them, authentic pure Welsh. The problem is that Argentinian Welsh is actually not particularly authentic or pure. Since these people don't have any particular Welsh nationalism, they haven't taken any particular care to keep their Welsh seperate from Spanish, so that a large number of Spanish words have entered the Argentinian Welsh lexicon. Yet the tourist trade brings in good money to these people, so they have developed ways of sounding like they are speaking authentic, pure Welsh when tourists are around. In particular, there has arisen among the Argentinian Welsh a practice of introducing back-formations from Spanish into their understanding of English, or more precisely their understanding of the ways in which the Welsh in Wales appropriate English words into Welsh pronunciation and syntax when it is necessary to invoke a concept for which Welsh doesn't have a word. (In Wales itself, incedentally, there are many social occasions, such as when speaking to a minister, on which it is frowned upon to use any words at all, so that one must constantly monitor the topics of conversation so as to avoid concepts which cannot readily be expressed in Welsh.) This, when an Argentinian Welsh speaker is speaking Welsh in the presence of a visiting Welsh tourist, and it becomes necessary to express a concept for which Argentinian Welsh does not have a Welsh word, what one does is to take the Spanish word, delete all the obviously Spanish particles, and mechanically back-produce a form that sounds like what English words sound like when they have been borrowed into Welsh. Keep in mind that the Argentinian Welsh speakers know not a single word of English, so that they have developed a more or less conscious set of rules for this procedure, reminiscent of the rules of Pig Latin, by induction from what they have heard in the Welsh spoken by the tourists. This procedure results in a number of accurate guesses, but it also results in a large number of oddly Latinate quasi-Welsh-English words as well. These latter words are taken by the tourists as a sign of the authenticity and purity of the Welsh spoken by Argentinians, because they sound like the tourists' idea of what Middle English words sounded like once they were incorporated into Middle Welsh, something about which they have no actual knowledge.>