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Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh [Paperback]

Pamela Petro
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
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Book Description

16 Oct 2009

The idiosyncratic and witty travelogue of a young Welsh-speaking woman who travels the globe in search of Welsh communities.



Product details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Flamingo; (Reissue) edition (16 Oct 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 000655010X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0006550105
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 1.7 x 12.9 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 429,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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Product Description

From the Back Cover

"Unlike most travel narratives, this is not a book about place, but a book about language. Can a language be said to describe a place, a place the language that is spoken there? Is it possible to travel to many different places and arrive, not back home, but in the terra incognita of a new language? And just where might that be?"

A young American woman of German-Hungarian descent comes to Wales, falls for the land and decides to learn the language. Why, why, ask all her friends and acquaintances. This brilliant, witty, wise book is her incontrovertible answer.

She starts, obviously, with the Welsh golfers of Oslo. Thereafter her odyssey takes her through fourteen countries on four continents in search of a language and its consequences. She practices and improves – and forgets – her Welsh with the expat cafe crowd of Paris, the TV correspondents of Brussels, the Gibbon lady of Bangkok, the students of Tokyo and the elderly of Patagonia, among others. Within the space of a week she can be found drinking sake and singing about Rugby and coalminers in Japan and then intoning Welsh Methodist hymns and imbibing mate in the Argentinean desert some six thousand miles away. There are many impediments to her progress – Welsh kitsch, slippage into English, an eisteddfod conducted in Spanish, mutation lessons, unreality endings – but the pull of the language, and its enthusiastic adherents worldwide, bring her on and through, into a sense of home.

Pamela Petro brings a rare flair for language to this stimulating, amusing and moving book about what happens when language meets identity. She flourishes her own 'Welsh' virtues – sociability, musicality, honesty – before us, and the hospitality her reader enjoys at her hands makes for something different, and sheer reading pleasure.

"'Travels in an Old Tongue' is a delightful read – a marvellous mixture of wit, nostalgia, character description and atmosphere-setting. Anyone who is Welsh, or who has connections with Wales, should read it, as should anyone who isn't, or hasn't, but who simply wants to work out what an earth is going on in the minds, hearts, and mouths of those for whom Welsh is the language of heaven."
PROFESSOR DAVID CRYSTAL

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Pamela Petro has been educated at Brown, Paris and Harvard Universities; in 1983 she went to the University of Wales at Lampeter for the first time, to do her MA, returning in 1992 for intensive instruction in the Welsh language. She has since taught Welsh and travel writing in the USA. She regularly contributes to the New York Times Travel Section and to Planet, and has compiled a guide to New England. This is her first ‘real’ book. She has, by the way, no Welsh blood.


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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A funny travel book no matter where you are from 20 July 2001
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
You don't have to be Welsh to enjoy this book. I am Welsh and have given it to friends in Wales, England and the USA who have all loved it.

Whilst she is an American learning Welsh, other people learning a different language will be able to relate to her problem of trying to understand and gain confidence in actually speaking a foreign language.

Her tales of travelling around the world and the characters she met keep the pace moving along nicely. For anyone wanting a funny travel book this is a must!

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars You can take the boy out of Wales! 21 Feb 2002
By Ceri Jenkins VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback
As a Welshman who has lived overseas for a number of years I found this book really struck a chord. Petro is an American, but her ability to understand and describe the Welsh personality is extraordinary. She obviously loved her subject matter, but to take on the task of learning Welsh and then conversing in it with native speakers took no shortage of courage. In all, a very witty book, and a re-affirmation that you can take the boy out of Wales, but you can never take Wales out of the boy.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable but 28 May 2001
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
This was a fun read, but does not go on any "must read" lists about Wales, Welsh culture, etc... The author spins some funny anecdotes about her travels around the world searching for the Welsh language, but the narrator should step back once in a while and let the story tell itself. Frankly, the author and her travelling companion, who has no discernable interest in the Welsh language or culture, do get on the reader's nerves tipyn bach. Petro does have a writer's talent but this is light reading that because of the novelty of its subject matter has achieved some cult following among the American Welsh and expats. By all means read it. But - for a true understanding of Welsh culture far better you read "The Matter of Wales" by Jan Morris, or "Land of My Fathers" by Gwynfor Evans.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is an excellent book. the author, an American has gained a love of Wales and "Welshness" from her time in Lampeter, learning Welsh but more importantly being in Wales. Her travels around the world, looking for Welsh people and Welsh speakers from all countries is fascinating, as a travel book firstly, but with the added interest of someone trying to understand what Welshness means, what being "very welsh" is, as well as other cultures. The whole book is a joy, and can be enjoyed without knowing anything about Wales, but as a "Saes" living in Wales, with a Welsh speaking wife and family, I enjoyed it on another level too. An outsider/insiders view of the Welsh, and attitudes towards the world. Read this book.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent, informative and very funny book 17 Jan 2000
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Essentially the story of one woman's travel round the world in search of Welsh speakers (with a view to practising the language without the corrupting influence of English), this book mixes information about the Welsh language and culture with insights into other cultures, in a fascinating collection of anecdotes that is at once thought provoking and funny (sometimes painfully so).

As a fairly new learner of Welsh myself, I found the comments about the language and its peaks and pitfalls especially interesting. In particular, Pamela Petro speaks a southern dialect of Welsh, whereas I am studying the very northern speech of Bangor, so it was interesting to read both her comments on the dialect differences and her actual southern-inflected Welsh phrases (don't worry - they all come with an English translation). On the other hand I think there is enough in this book to appeal to people from fluent Welsh speakers to those with no knowledge whatsoever of the language.

In summary, this book is excellent, or as we say in Welsh: "mae'r llyfr 'ma yn fendigedig!"

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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The very idea of touring the world chasing up Welsh speakers got my interest right from the start.
Following Pamela's plans for her travels
and the frustrations caused, could have proved rather limited in reader interest but the way she interspersed snippets of history, comparisons of cultural differences, Welsh poetry and writings drew me on to the next page and the next. Never mind that I could not begin to pronounce the phrases in Welsh and had, like someone learning to read, to gloss over them, it put me "in touch" with my Welshness and was all part of the magic that she conjured up.
The travels jump around the world with flash backs to Wales and yet it is not confusing and there are some wonderfully descriptive sentences which drip from her pen as though she has dipped it in a particularly strong bottle of Welsh ink.
Her astute observations of why people outside Wales are more Welsh than those who never left the valleys and why speaking English is a distinct disadvantage in learning Welsh are very funny too.
Altogether it is a "good read" and I had a great urge to go see for myself whilst acknowledging that she has greater stamina than I have.
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2 of 15 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars trite and stereotypical 8 May 2005
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
want to read a wingy rant by a silly yank let loose throughout the world? want to hear someone moan about how bad they are at learning languages? wnat to learn next to nothing worth knwoing about welsh? want to spend a couple hundred pages thinking 'what a miseed opportunity'? wnat to read a bunch of stereotypes from the way u.s. americans see others? then this is the book for you. i too wnet to llambedr to learn welsh, i too am not welsh - and there was a load more interesting people there to talk to than this author. as she rightly asks herself: pam? why in welsh... why write it? why read it?
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