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Part of traveling the world as an Anglophone involves the uncomfortable realization that everyone else is better at learning your language than people like you are at learning theirs. It’s particularly obvious in the world of programming languages, where English-derived language and syntax rules the roost.
It’s always IF foo THEN bar, and never SI foo ALORS bar. It is now possible to do something akin to OS foo YNA bar though, because [Richard Hainsworth] has created y Ddraig (the Dragon), a programming language using Welsh language as syntax. (The Welsh double D, “Dd” is pronounced something like an English soft “th” as in “their”)
Under the hood it’s not an entirely new language, instead it’s a Welsh localisation of the Raku language. A localisation file is created, that can as we understand it handle bidirectional transcription between languages. The write-up goes into detail about the process.
There will inevitably be people asking what the point of a programming language for a spoken language with under a million native speakers is, so it’s worth taking a look at that head on. It’s important for Welsh education and the Welsh tech sector because a a geeky kid in a Welsh-medium school Pwllheli deserves to code just as much as an English kid in a school near Oxford, but it goes far beyond Welsh alone. There are many languages and cultures across the world where English is not widely spoken, and every single one of them has those kids like us who pick up a computer and run with it. The more of them that can learn to code, and thrive without having the extra burden of knowing English, the better. Perhaps in a couple of decades we’ll be using code from people who learned this way, without our ever knowing it.
As your scribe, this needs to be added: Mae’n ddrwg gyda fi ffrendiau Cymraeg, mae Cymraeg i yn wael iawn. Dwi’n dôd o’r Rhydychen, ni Pwllheli.
Header image: Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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