Talk:Coelbren y Beirdd

Some comments on the page e.g. add a tabulation of the letters of the Coelbren

The page as it stands is good and I do not want to disturb your work but I think that it could be added to by talking about modern enthusiasts for the Coelbren such as pseudo historians, neo-pagans and scholars of Welsh Romantic literature of the 18c and 19c. e.g.

pseudo-historian Alan Wilson ( an associate of Baram Blackett ) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIbBrqvN8og - actually this video has a bit more pace and panache - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf4hUcTZ3sM - but I assure you that its reasoning is as bad as its spelling - http://www.badarchaeology.com/?page_id=832

You are on safer ground with the modern romanticisms of Neo-Pagans who do not try to fool anyone but themselves and along the way can create some charming visions of spiritualities as yet unknown - http://thekolbrin.com/ - http://sisterhoodofavalon.org/soa2013/resources/recommended-reading

What intrigues me is that whilst Iolo Morgannwg most probably did put the Coelbren together he equally most probably did not invent it so much as adapt it from the existing cleft stick and then borrow ideas from antiquarian resources that were already abounding and those are probably the main reasons why his Coelbren was accepted as authentic. [ SEE P.S. BELOW ] This page in French gives examples of the sorts of materials which he most probably drew upon - http://racines.traditions.free.fr/ecriture/index.htm - and in Luke Eastwood's " The Druid's Primer ' he argues that Latin, Greek and Phoenician scripts have influenced Britain and Ireland's literary development. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vuV0Qk96IKkC&dq=coelbren+phoenician&source=gbs_navlinks_s

The main reason I think why Iolo's Coelbren seemed so credible to his contemporaries was that they were used to seeing tally-sticks in everyday life, which have now entirely disappeared from the modern world and therefore out of the imaginations and therefore reasoning of modern people about Iolo and the Coelbren. Imagine if you will that I send you an email in a strange script which makes no sense to you but looks as if it is written in an ancient language : if I came to you then and said that " ĦƪƛȶȜȝȵȴ " was in fact the ancient battle cry of the Cardi-iffi-ani then, given that I can not even type them into this message other than by those characters being accepted as authentic in some way because these characters all have authentic ascii codes and therefore have real sounds and meanings somewhere in the world, you might well take my word for it as an authority upon all of such subjects to be found in Wikipedia ... indeed that is Wikipedia's problem !

When Iolo whittled idly at sticks to fashion his alphabet he may well have been copying something that he had actually seen such as some kind of record keeping system being used by shepherds or perhaps by free-masons such as his father [ A PROPER MASON - ' IN FREE STONE ' - A CARVER OF LETTERS ON GRAVESTONES etc. ] Not only was paper rare and expensive in 18c Wales because it did not grow on trees, but paper records in that rural rain-soaked Wales would have been absolutely useless. The old joke about sending a messager around with cleft sticks misses the point if you imagine it to mean that the message was a piece of paper stuck into a forked stick. It really was a cleft stick with some kind of notation or symbols carved upon the split surface which illiterates could recognise the meaning of in much the same way that teenagers " txt 2 u " leaving literate parents puzzled. These messages once understood were replied to by shaving off a new face erasing the original message and replacing it with a new one and eventually both shavings and sticks ended up on the cottage's fire just as we stick the now useless letters that we get from our banks and governments through the shredder today : presumeably neither will anyone believe in future ages that such things ever existed either, nor the Coelbren.

There is a story ( the exact historical detail unfortunately eludes me ) of a some self-taught mathematician solving some age old problem upon his ' note-pad ' which was a block of wood which he shaved a new face upon in order to provide a new ' page ' each time to work out the next part of the problem using his carpenter's pencil, as calculations might be made for joinery or carpentry. Triumphant one evening that he had solved the age old problem after much intellectual struggle, whose understanding had permanently eluded the ancients, he spent the rest of his life trying to put the shavings back together to prove to others that he had indeed succeeded. As ever the tragic aspect of the Welsh nation is that we are so poor we can not even afford the paperwork let alone such things as a proper government, although of course richer nations envy us for our lack of paper if not our lack of work ... Originally masons and carpenters did not use pencils but various scribing instruments to write and mark with on stone and wood - this was what the purpose of pouring plaster onto the floor of masons' lodges was for and why therefore " Freemason's Lodges " have a squared pattern on the floor - the squares resulted from the setting out which was scratched into the plaster on the floor - instead of shaving off the face of a block of wood as the carpenters did the masons simply poured new plaster over the floor in preparation for setting out the new job. Iolo Morgannwg was of course a time-served " free " mason.

Finally surely this page needs an image like the following or an actual table to be made up of the Coelbren's letters - http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/images/scolar/image-180645-web.jpg - which came from - http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/libraries/scolar/digital/typography.html DaiSaw (talk) 21:03, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

[ P.S. ] Thinking afterwards about where Iolo Morgannwg may have borrowed from, besides tally-sticks and antiquarian texts, it is well known that he not only traveled widely across South Wales but also the South of England through what was historically the northern part of ancient Wessex in order to get to London. As he walked he most probably earned what he could along the way by visiting parish churches to ask as to whether there was anybody who wanted inscriptions to be added to gravestones etc by himself as an itinerant mason. Long after Iolo's death there was the Victorian mania for rebuilding parish churches which resulted in many protests about the historical features which were being swept away - whole churches were swept away including some as old as Anglo-Saxon ones of which few survive such as St Laurence's in Bradford on Avon which was not recognised as such at the time. About half of the ' letters ' in the Coelbren are reminiscent of those of the Anglo Saxon runic alphabet but mostly are not assigned the same phonic values - but it is entirely probable that Iolo's borrowings were taken from examples of runic inscriptions either in antiquarian's books or from actual examples which he witnessed in his travels. He most certainly spent time in the vicinity of Bath and Bradford on Avon and must have see their Anglo-Saxon churches - http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-399748-church-of-st-nicholas-kelston- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Laurence's_Church,_Bradford-on-AvonDaiSaw (talk) 01:05, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

As archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews says at[1], "I don’t know which version of Caesar’s de Bello Gallico the videomaker has read, but it’s certainly no version that has ever appeared in print. There is nothing in his writings about Coelbren, the similarity between the Greek and British alphabets, British cities, roads and universities that students flocked from all over the world to study at (the closest he gets to this is when he says that the Druids are thought to have originated in Britain). Edward Jones (Iolo Morgannwg) may have claimed that Ammianus Marcellinus mentions the British alphabet: he doesn’t. I particularly like the slide that says “Were Julius Caesar, Ammianus Marcellinus and others who wrote about it LIARS? Do these people not read histories?”. My first reaction was LOL. My second reaction was incredulity that the videomaker could write something so stupid. He clearly hasn’t read the historians. No matter what late eighteenth century antiquaries may have claimed, nobody, but nobody mentioned Coelbren before Edward Jones. End of story. William Owen, whom the videomaker seems to regard as independent of Edward Jones was his collaborator!" Doug Weller talk 07:27, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

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Attestation

Are any of the documents / artefacts with these characters still extant? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.61.180.106 (talk) 18:45, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Proposal for encoding Coelbren y Beirdd script into Unicode.

I think this Old Welsh (as claimed by Edward Williams) script needs to be encoded into Unicode, maybe version 14 or later. It would be nice to write Welsh in it's unique Bardic alphabet, as the Ogham script did not suit Welsh well. Even the Deseret and Shavian scripts are encoded into Unicode but not this Welsh script. 94.180.124.9 (talk) 01:02, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Some people might consider that to be equivalent to encoding Psalmanazar's alphabet... AnonMoos (talk) 02:59, 11 June 2022 (UTC)