Astudiaethau Celtaidd ayb.

One thing that really struck me and some other people in our Cornish decolonisation group was how confident the Native American authors in the book were in introducing themselves with their cultures. Many of them listed two or more Native cultures that they were part of, and some listed European ancestry too. I've never been very confident in stating my cultural background. I sometimes hesitate to call myself Welsh because my family don't come from Wales, even though I've lived my entire life here (except from the four months I just spent in Ireland on the exchange semester). I hesitate even more to call myself by the cultures that my family come from, even though they raised me. I wish I had the confidence to call myself "Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish". Maybe I'll start today. I think part of my hesitating is because there are a lot of people (mainly white Americans) who say some very strange and uncomfortable things about their Irish or Scottish ancestry, and understandably a lot of Scottish and Irish people in Scotland and Ireland don't like that, and I'm scared of receiving the same backlash, even though my Scottish and Irish family are still alive and raised me, unlike a lot of Americans who have Scottish/Irish heritage one or two hundred years ago, or more. Mostly Irish and Scottish people I've met in real life seem accepting of me though. I think the fact that my Cornish/Scottish/Irish family raised me to consider myself Cornish/Scottish/Irish is an invitation to do so, and to be part of those cultures. When people emigrate they don't do so with the goal of severing themselves and their children from their cultures.

But also I feel at odds with my ancestry in other ways. I have an English great-great-grandfather and an Ulster Scots great-great-great-grandfather, so I struggle with thinking about how my English/Ulster Scots/Lowland Scots ancestors and their nations were colonising and committing crimes against my Irish/Cornish/Scottish ancestors (yes Scotland ends up on both sides of this) (and my Welsh ancestors. Although they wouldn't have been my biological ancestors, I still view Welsh people in the past as like my cultural ancestors. They came before me in this land and culture and are still part of my history I think). I don't really know how to reconcile with this. I can accept that somewhere like Wales has a dual role as coloniser and colonised and I can accept our colonisation of Patagonia and role in the British Empire (although I don't condone it, but I can accept that it happened and empathise with those we colonised), but knowing that I had colonisers in my family history who were colonising my other ancestors' cultures feels harder to grapple with. I think in some way I am ashamed of my English and Ulster Scots ancestors, and I don't think I want to be. They're part of me too. I sort of have a belief that your ancestors are able to watch the living world and can see you, although I don't know where this belief came from, if it comes from any traditional belief passed down to me or if it's just my OCD. I hope that my Cornish/Irish/Scottish/Welsh ancestors would be proud that I want to be involved with language revitalisation, and that I'm studying Celtic Studies at university, and that I can even go to university. And maybe my colonising English and Ulster Scots ancestors would be pleased to see me, a Welsh/Scottish/Irish/Cornish person, so depressed and hopeless about my identity and my languages and cultures, speaking English as a first language. Can your ancestors love you? Can they hate you?

I like that in Indigenous spaces people introduce themselves with their cultures and the lands they're connected to. It's something I wish we did in Celtic Studies spaces. There are a lot of English people in Celtic Studies spaces, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (in fact, I think that if English people want to put in decolonisation work and be allies to Celtic peoples then there should be more of them getting involved in Celtic spaces), but I wish they would state "I'm English", otherwise we're going to end up with our colonisers leading our discussions and studies, which is something that has already happened in the Cornish language scene. I feel like that when I'm engaging in anti-racism things, I always state that I'm white, and that I know the discussion is not about me or for me, but that I want to learn. Why are so many of the most prominent voices in the Cornish language revival English ones? Why are we allowing the nation that took our language to lead it? Why are we letting our colonisers have the main say in our future? English people who consider themselves allies can and should be listening to Celtic peoples, but I do not think they should be the ones leading it (and I would say this applies to any oppressed group and their allies from their oppressing class). As the Sámi/Cornish person leading our decolonisation group said to me "One of the things that strikes me about Celtic studies is that it’s this primarily study of a group, and not study of the world by that group. In Sámi studies (and Indigenous studies generally), the primary focus is producing Sámi knowledge about the world, from a Sámi perspective." I think I like that idea better than what we have currently in Celtic Studies. I don't want to hear English, American, German, French, etc. academics spending years arguing about me and my nations and my ancestors. Why can Celtic Studies sometimes feel so Anglicised, and generally Westernised, to me. I mean, I'm pretty sure modern Celtic Studies academia came from German academics studying Celtic philology, and not from us producing our own knowledge, so perhaps that's why.

I've seen a number of English people online use Celtic names and avoid questions aimed at them about their cultural background, which seems sinister. I've seen Anglo-American academics complaining online about how hard it is in the Celtic Studies field when you don't have any Celtic ancestry. I've seen English academics getting stroppy online about how no one wants to listen to their opinion because they're an "outsider" and how actually outsiders have new perspectives to offer, which in my opinion is incredibly entitled to our endangered cultures and ignores the fact that we all know what your "outsider" opinions are already, as English worldviews have been shoved down the throats of 5 out of 6 Celtic nations for hundred of years. As a trans person, I don't care about cis academics' opinions on me, as a disabled person I don't care about abled academics' opinions on me, as a white academic I wouldn't expect non-white people to care about my opinions on them, and as a Celtic person I don't see why I should care about English academics' opinions on me.

I've wanted this book for 3 years but I could only find it online for like £100 but I just found it in the charity shop I volunteer in for £7!! yippeeeeee

I feel like I've struck gold, found the holy grail, etc.

Ma'n deimlad chwerw ond melys, yn gwylio pawb arall yn graddio ac yn teimlo'n falch drostyn nhw, er mod i'n dal i orfod neud 2 flynedd cyn i fi allu graddio oherwydd fy iechyd :')

I can invent new types of mutation that the world has never seen before.

/s/ -> /z/ would be kinda cool as a soft mutation, and /dʒ/ -> /nj/ as a nasal mutation. /s/ -> /z/ apparently happens in some dialect of Irish as an urú? I forgot where i read it. It's somewhere in Munster I think.

I might just have like an entirely new type of mutation too. The Brythonic languages all have soft, aspirate, and mixed (although Welsh grammar never really acknowledges the mixed one in the same way as Cornish or Breton do). Welsh additionally has the nasal mutation, and Cornish and Breton both have the hard mutation. But like what if there was another one.... what would it be...

Starting on the Brythonic conlang today... I don't really know how to start with a conlang so I'm writing down all the phonemes and the letters that represent them in Welsh, Cornish, and Breton and then like... I'll somehow work out which ones to put in my language.

I failed the overall TEG exam but I passed the oral part so I think I can still get partial certification... I'm actually really upset :( It was a hard exam and very different to university exams but I honestly thought i did ok... I'm surprised I passed the oral but not the written one considering I hate oral exams so much.

It costs €150 to appeal the exam results LOL, I don't have the money. I will not be doing that. The course already cost me €100 and the exam cost €170 to take. I am not spending another €150 when they will probably still decide that it's a fail. I'm really upset with myself I thought I did enough to pass :(

The problem with lectures is that I get fatigued too easily and the problem with no lectures is that now I have no structure and routine so I get anxious. There's still like 3 months until I am in a lesson again :( I have somewhat of a routine over the summer with my music stuff and the charity shop and I'm trying to set specific days to study specific languages, so I'm trying to have a weekly schedule but I like to be given lessons and assignments and tasks :( But also those are so so hard because of my health. How do I win.

I want to read all my PDFs on indigenous language revitalisation and decolonisation and related topics before August because that's when I'm supposed to be re-doing the 2 essays I didn't manage to do in November/December, and I had been working on a question that was like "how can post-colonial perspectives enhance our understanding of history" or something like that, and the choice of questions they give me for the re-sit are going to be different but I'm really hoping there will be one related to decolonisation because that's what I'm really interested in writing about and learning more about.

I do think Wales and the other Celtic nations could/should engage with Indigenous peoples around the world more. I've seen some people from Celtic nations describe themselves as Indigenous peoples (as well as other Indigenous peoples call us Indigenous too), and I think maybe we could call ourselves that?? (Especially I have been thinking about it in terms of Ireland and the Irish people in the north being described as Indigenous people in territory occupied by British settlers) But I also think that maybe we need to engage with the wider global Indigenous community more and acknowledge our own complicity in colonialism better before we can call ourselves that. I think some people can't grapple with our status as colonised and coloniser (e.g. Wales and y Wladfa, Scotland and Gaelic-speaking parts of Canada, etc). And it's not like there aren't other Indigenous peoples across the world who have been complicit in colonialism, genocide, etc. (e.g. the Māori and the Moriori genocide, Sámi being encouraged to settle North America, etc.) But I think they have a sense of being in a wider, global Indigenous community/sense of identity that we (Celtic peoples) don't. I don't think a lot of us were brought up to consider ourselves Indigenous/Native (I certainly wasn't).

Also it's not uncommon for white supremacists to be obsessed with our 'indigeneity' or whatever and to use the term to weaponise our marginalisation against immigrant/non-white members of our nations, so I think we definitely have to be careful with applying the term Indigenous with a capital I to ourselves. Of course 'indigenous' with a lower case i is frequently used to describe our languages and peoples and cultural practices from pre-Anglicisation/-Francisation.