Musing: books - Yeah, why not, who cares about my culture anyway

I have several rants about the treatment of the Welsh in books, and the treatment of Welsh/Celtic culture in general, including a really good one about the cultural appropriation of Arthur (yes, Arthur was ours first). Right now, though, I'm far too busy seething.

Today I started reading a book that actually shocked me by being very pro-Welsh in plot and characterisation despite being based on a supposedly quintessentially English story. The fact that I'm shocked at this is worrying enough, but let's leave that aside.

The thing that really bugged me was reading some reviews and they were all bitching about the Welsh names and places being included.

Wales is an awkward language. We do all kinds of fun things like make letters have different sounds. 'W' is sometimes 'oo', 'dd' is 'th', 'f' (or is it 'ff'?) is 'v', etc. It's confusing. I know. It took me ages to wrap my tongue around Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. In fact, I'm not all that sure I could say it right now if I tried. I get it! Welsh isn't easy!

Apparently that means that, to make it easy for non-Welsh readers, the names/places should be Anglicised.

In case you don't realise what's wrong with that, turn your mind to the English domination of the rest of the UK and have a good think about one of the ways they did that.

Hint: suppression of their languages.

But who cares? It's just the Welsh. It's not like we were oppressed for ages or anything.

O. Wait.

At least nobody was bitching that it's "wrong" to set Robin Hood in Wales. Not that I've seen anyway. If it's out there, I don't want to know.