Gone Tomorrow

When I started wilfing around the internet nine or ten years ago one of the few web resources for language shift in Wales and also the English counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire was a site called Gwefan Catalunya-Cymru, indeed it seems to have been on-line since 1995. As far as I can tell the tri-lingual site - Catalan, Welsh and English - has now disappeared except for the odd page and what has been preserved in Google cache.

From what remains of the site here's a letter writer to the journal Seren Gomer in 1845, describing a snippet of conversation illustrating the process of language shift in Newbridge-on-Wye:

“Evan,” meddai un hen ŵr wrth y Bontnewydd, yn swydd Faesyfed, ag oedd yn tybied ei fod yn gryn dalp mewn gwybodaeth Seisnig, “go and fetch me the bar harn from the beudy.”
“Daid,” meddai y bachgenyn, which shall I bring from the beudy, the bar harn bach or the bar harn mawr?”

"Evan," said one old man from by Newbridge, in Radnorshire, who believed he had a fair grasp of English, "go and fetch me the iron bar from the cowshed."
"Grandfather," said the lad, "which shall I bring from the cowshed, the little iron bar or the big iron bar?"

UPDATE: It seems the Catalunya-Cymru site is back on line. Good, hope it stays that way, a lot of interesting info there.