No, Old Welsh Is Not Ancient Egyptian.

I forgot the end credits music! Sorry everyone, consider me singing “Sospan Fach” by way of apology!

Excellent.

Sounds very interesting and will have to finish watching it. Have you tried positioning yourself in an awkward position with ear plugs in your ears and with cucumber slices over your eyes? Only giving silent focus on the cucumber seeds for a timed minute and progressing a minute more after 4 days. Or have you tried sleep during the day for at least 2 to 3 days a week? Its basically go to sleep late in the day and wake at night. Not to be considered medical advise or diagnosis for specific condition since I'm not a physician of any kind. Thinking possibly they found thier way/had a migration to the US as well.

Forgive me, but this just sounds like using hieroglphs to replace the individual letters in your (English or Welsh) name and then saying that that is your name in Egyptian. Clearly it isn't and any self respecting Ancient Egyptian would just laugh at you. Or are they just playing the "sounds a bit like... therefore it is" game. Either way it's just nonsense.
Anyway keep up the good work and thanks for another great post.

Bro 7 people disliked this, what did they not like?

This feels a lot like being in sixth grade and realizing I could wipe the floor with most people at two truths and a lie if I just chose an obscure fact, used the right tone of voice and added enough surface level knowledge about the aspects surrounding it. Perversely, it also worked on the GMs, because they rarely if ever kept a copy of the reference material for themselves during the game, and could not tell which would-be rube was just very confidently telling utter hogwash about a subject they had a degree in and had spent hours preparing facts about the night before.

This isn't academics being butthurt that no one will accept their theory. This is a student taking to twitter after it turns out their professor actually has access to the semi-obscure text they used to lend credence to their doctored references.

what a silly thing

Some people just have to play "I'm smarter than you are." Generally, they're not.

How about a video on Proto-Celtic?

My background is in the biological sciences and I'm from the US where there is no shortage of....folks...who offer....alternative explanations....for biological phenomena. So, from that perspective, I appreciate how hard it can be to do a calm analysis and critique of pseudoscience. However, unlike your relationship to the Welsh language, biological sciences isn't my *culture*, it's not my heritage, and when I consider that aspect of it all, I wouldn't blame you for ranting. Like, burn the house down, take no prisoners, scorched earth, wholesale destruction of their "theory", their intellect, their morals, their everything. I mean the absolute gall of these people, I just, just... well. Hats off to you for your restraint. I hope you at least farted in their general direction.

The sad thing is is that this basically gives a big middle finger to actual Welsh history and the origin of the Welsh language.

Wheat flail and shepards crok for sheep. Agri tools

Yes the yugiho reference 😂

funny, i've never heard this theory and it seems pretty ridiculous to me... but i do have my own pet theory regarding the linguistic/typographical provenance of the "ll" sound in welsh, which seems to me rather likely to have been borrowed in from various semitic script. basically, medieval manuscripts show the "ll" having a sort of bar between the two lines, which makes it look quite a bit like various semitic characters associated with hebrew's "ח", which is pronounced very similiarly to the welsh "ll" (the oral posture and breath movement of both can, though not always is, be quite identical). i'm also fairly sure that ð is connected to the early semitic "fish daled" precursor, which we know looked like a fish and was pronounced like vibrating a "d" sound...

my conclusion is thus far that welsh (and other european, in case of "ð") typographers chose to borrow semitic characters for sounds at various points, rather than invent new ones out of whole cloth... because that's where most of what we know today as "latin" letters originate, too. a great deal of greek and later latin characters, honestly pretty unsurprisingly, imo, resemble or simply literally are those of nearby semitic languages. and in turn, semitic characters largely evolved from pictograms, many of which are shared in both form and pronounciation, with various egyptian hieroglyphs.

so from the standpoint of curiosities in linguistic evolution, i get where people might see letters that evolved from pictograms that often overlapped with hieroglyphics and go "hey wait a minute - that's totally a hieroglyph!" and just run wild with it, i guess... if you just conveniently ignore literally every other language between medieval welsh and ancient egyptian, both chronologically and geographically! 😅

Never heard this theory before, but immediately knew it was fake because there would be no motivation for Ancient Egyptian people to migrate to a tiny island in the north sea. They would need a very good material or political reason to migrate over 2000 miles, and that's not even getting into how difficult that migration would be. The British Isles weren't a particularly desirable place to live (cold, damp, remote) and didn't become of global significance until relatively recently. I think a lot of people don't realise that because it's not often talked about.

Well done for keeping together during this video and, as you say, not turning it into a rant. I also appreciate that you have expanded my persepctive: as an ignorant Englishman I had never thought that there was an "Old Welsh". I just assumed that Welsh had been the same for hundreds (thousands) of years!

I am glad to see this video...not only because I enjoy all of your videos, but because it puts to rest what I assumed was a wrong idea when I first heard it more definitively than my "Uh...no, I don't think so" did when I heard it originally.

I encountered this idea about eight years ago, from a Welsh-descended English guy living in Canada who wasn't any sort of scholar, but was a guest teacher in a particular martial arts-based practice I was doing that our main teacher brought in. I was suspicious of a great deal of what he said about that particular practice and some of the claims he was making for it, which is another subject entirely; but then, after our class, we all went out to dinner and when he heard that I am a Celticist, this was his "opening gambit" in the "Well I know more than you" conversation that so many geeky types often engage in when other people are just sharing their experiences or answering basic questions. When he gave the basic outlines of it, and not only scoffed at but outright insulted and demeaned anyone who believes that Coptic and/or the Rosetta Stone can be used to figure out aspects of Ancient Egyptian pronunciation as "ignorant idiots" and "lowlife degenerates" (an attitude which is actually against the basic principles of what the martial arts-based practice establishes, which in itself should have been a clue that he was not only spurious as all get out, but also highly questionable in all that he said!) and that Old Welsh is the real key to it all. When I asked him for references, he told me that it was all so obvious that if I can't see it for myself by just looking, my doctoral degree was not worth the parchment upon which it was printed. This same individual was later revealed to be a bigot in many ways, highly questionable politically and morally, and in general a very unpleasant person...as if what we had seen and heard and experienced on that first occasion did not also convey the same.

I hadn't heard of this one. Ridiculous of course - and though you only mentioned it in passing, it's 100% driven by racism.

It's so tiring to have people like that, trying to poop on other people's cultures and/or history

Yeah in farsi its the same, only long vowels are written down

Reminds me of that medieval "myth" (I can't find a better term, I am not a native english speaker) that said, in a nutshell, that Scotland was founded by Scota (I think that was the name), the daughter of a pharoh.

Whoever came up with that evidently had a stash of the bad stuff

Here's an unrelated question for you jimmy, how often did people wear tablet woven things in the past, and why would they ?

Well obviously it’s because the ancient Welsh and the Ancient Greek people were both highly intelligent rational people and the language structure both used is the best language structure and very intuitive to reasonable intelligent people. The Romans tried to emulate it and put their own spin on language to make Latin, needlessly complicating the perfection of the Greek language, and the English were fools that were not smart enough to learn Welsh and therefore made the more clever people in Wales learn English instead

Cymroglyphics?! LMAO!!! 😂 😂 😂

Admirable restraint, sir!

Remids me a bit of an old speculation I've heard rattling around from probably the Victorians that the Irish are the (very) Lost Tribe of Israel. But we all know the Victorian intellectuals were fond of spouting whole theories from absinthe and cobwebs, and who would dare dispute them?

I like the "we're not going to rant" and your teeth are bared before the opening credits. :D :D But really you're very calm and pleasant. :)

I would have thought DNA testing & genetics would slap down most of these claims about Atlanteans, Ancient Egyptions, Phoenicians etc being the founders of diff cultures.

You don't need to know that your language is 4.5k years old ... all of our languages are as old as humankind. Every one is propagated by people going back to when language first existed in pre exodus Africa ... I'm not throwing shade on any one language with that ... we all have a tongue that speaks something which is the product of everyone who spoke that before us going back forever. I'm also not saying the derivations we can know isn't fascinating. But we all speak and we all speak what we do because of what went before us.

just my random thought, if a group was traveling all the way from Egypt to Wales, I feel like there would be evidence along the way. Like a couple of "Set was here" inscriptions en route

Eitha diddorol, dwi'n cytino da chi. Hefyd mae Jimmy y golygydd angen crib 😆

I feel like the idiom "silly goose" should have been taken into consideration by the person positing the theory.

As an academic who studies historical linguistics and philology that works backward from Modern English (not the band, but also kinda the band, when you really think about it), I find myself often facepalming when I see theories like this because they almost always fall into the same trap: the math of language is only valid until you try to negate the art of language.

Dead languages were alive once, and too many people seem to forget to consider that fact.

Oh, where to begin? I have read Ross Broadstock's book, and Wilson & Blackett's, the source of this theory. There is just so much I could say, but let's just start with how they "translated" into Welsh the names Alexandros, Ptolemaios, and Kleopatra when written in hieroglyphs. Why in the world would these mean anything whatsoever in hieroglyphs other than simply writing the Greek names phonetically?

The other thing that I just cannot understand is how the phonetic values from the Egyptian that Broadstock claims are (mostly) identical in Welsh are known ONLY because the actual Egyptian word is also found in Coptic, the last stage of Egyptian when it was written in the Greek alphabet. For example, the /r/ hieroglyph of a mouth is "translated" as rhoch (utter, proclaim according to him), but the only reason we know the mouth hieroglyph is /r/ in Egyptian is because the Coptic (i.e., very late Egyptian) word for "mouth" is ro; without that, the "Welsh" doesn't work -- it cannot be both Welsh and Coptic, and without the Coptic, there is no reason to assume a phonetic value of /r/ at all.

Another issue is that while you could (with imagination) string along some phrases in "Welsh" based on a symbolic understanding of the hieroglyphs, anything longer (such as, say, a temple wall or papyrus) is completely meaningless as it cannot be consistently applied; you get pure nonsense on that level. It only works in Egyptian because, you know, there is grammar and all that other stuff that makes it work consistently over 1000s of texts.

When he writes hieroglyphs, such as in Egyptian names like Ramesses, he often moves them around in to an order that suits him, or rotates them in bizarre ways, not actually what is written.

Finally, as other comments have pointed out, "shaduf" is not even Egyptian, it is Arabic -- Broadstock has loads of Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and other non-Egyptian words in his book and he evidently did not even realize this, thinking they must have been Egyptian. One of the funniest ones is when he claims "Tirhaka" is "Welsh" ti-rha-ka (with some nonsense meaning); the problem is that Tirhaka is the Hebrew spelling (from the Bible) of the Kushite name Taharqo; it's not Egyptian at all, though it is written (as Taharqo) in hieroglyphs. Other non-Egyptian words he thinks are Egyptian (and thus Welsh) include serdab (Arabic), Haeroeris (Greek, but from Egyptian Heru-wer), Anubis (Greek but from Egyptian Inpu); for the Greek forms of Egyptian divine names, he actually used the Greek form; I don't think he was aware of the underlaying Egyptian.

I could go on, but the "fact" that he claims to read, for example, the hieroglyphs of the name ra-ms-su as "Ruler of this place, order and untroubled supremacy" (what does this mean???) rather than Ramessu "Ra (is the one who) gives birth to him" following Egyptian grammatical conventions really says everything. Writing records more than just phonetic sounds, it records language (including the grammar) and does so consistently that can be applied to any text in that language, something which escaped Broadstock.

Oh, one other thing. If we assume this is correct and the ancient Egyptians were really Welsh, where did Coptic come from, and why are there no Coptic texts in Wales? Did it magically appear in Egypt when the locals converted to Christianity? Who knows!

Sadly, despite his theories being pure nonsense, he died in 2022, and he was not that old. I was legitimately sad to hear that.

I've heard people claim Welsh and Hebrew are cognate too. I'm not a linguist, but last time I checked Welsh is a Indo-European language, not a Afro-Asiatic one. From my understanding, Welsh has no Hebrew cognates, expect maybe some vocabulary from the bible.
(All I know about Welsh is that some consonants undergo lenition, thanks Tolkien!).

Trying to force connect ancient Egypt to other cultures should be illegal.

Goose is perhaps the weirdest of words to pick, because a lot of these words for birds trace back to various words in Sumerian as well, where kurku (ḫu-ru-ug mušen = ḫu-ru-gu kur-ku-u, which is likely the earliest recording of some of these likely onomatopoeic words for birds, such as the Crow and Crane. It becomes impossible to disentangle, but it is almost certain that the migration toward Ireland around 6000 years ago from the Black Sea region was set out upon by people who would have carried with them certain Sumerian words for commodities), and uz, geese and ducks, would have been viable livestock for migrating populations, easy to transport, and easy to breed, also not very difficult to catch.

I didn't come at any of this from the Ancient Egyptian route. I was studying Sumerian and Akkadian when I found the etymon of the Crocus in Sumerian Kurgirin, "Mountain Flower," which was Kurkanu in Akkadian, Karkom in Hebrew, and Crocus in the Indo-European languages of those who traded with the Phoenicians, buying their Saffron for Gold. The Kurgi of Kurgirin is kurku in Akkadian, "Goose," which led me down a rabbit hole.

The question is whether some of these words made it into Welsh and Irish through the Phoenicians or whether they possessed the words from the time of their migration into Western Europe. Is Cronan derived through the Semitic languages, or is it derived through PIE languages that had referred to it since the time of the Sumerians by the Sumerian term (and the Sumerians were likely buying a lot of Saffron)? This is a real question for the linguists to answer. I suspect the simplest explanation is that some but not all of this is the effect of Phoenician mercantile. Also, the Phoenicians likely spread their culture among the Celts of the Iberian peninsula and into Ireland at an early date (pre-Carthage). The region is great for growing Saffron, and the Phoenicians made a lot of their money in the Saffron trade and had settled the area from around 1000 bce most likely.

But there is a reason the bust of Lady Carcas has a six-petaled rosette on it at Carcassonne. There is a reason that the Church of Mary Magdalene at Rennes-le-Chateau not far away places the Crocus at the center of the crosses.

I'm pretty sure the notion of Egyptians coming to Wales is literally from Pat Mills Slaine stories? Like.... Pat made it all up and it looks really cool but its explicitly so they could have cool looking stuff in Clint Langleys art in the books of invasions. They bring flame thrower pistols as well. Its really cool.

wait, is this whole "gwyn=wisdom" why the old arthurian grwenhuivard (later= lady gwenevere) is called thus?

Never heard of this theory, but this has been a fascinating peek into what some people believe to be true. Reminds me of XKCD 2071

In my opinion, if a hypothesis does not consider a broad range of evidence, rather than one source, it should be dismissed as dishonest or conspiracy theory. It need not explain everything perfectly - and it would be suspicious if it did - but it should get a lot right. Claims on such narrow evidence is deliberately ignoring how other hypotheses are better explanations just so they can feel smart. That's dishonesty and you have a right to dismiss such advocates as liars or lunatics.

PSEUDOSCIENCE IS DANGEROUS! These "theories" are usually invented for a reason, and this reason is never a genuine pursuit of knowledge — it's something malicious

Jimmy: "We should be respectful and polite"

Also Jimmy: "You come into MY house, that will trigger a response" visibly seethes with barely controlled rage and murder in his eyes

(Okay I fully respect your actual original point, and I'm not saying you meant to look as scary as you did then, but I am saying that you do an excellent villain face and I am very amused by it :D )

The Welsh obviously went and built the pyramids, got the idea from all the spoil heaps

Next you have to do the “Wales is the lost tribe of Israel” theory!
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 🍻 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Never heard of this. Makes me feel better that I don't hear stuff like this in my part of the internet

This comes with the Re-imagining of actual history and having African Vikings, Chinese members of the Scottish and English courts of the Medieval times, Africans represented as Spanish ambassadors to the Tudor court, Sub-Saharan Africans as Iraqi Bowmen in Hadrians Wall in 123AD, and ridiculous conspiracy theories that started with Ancient Aliens etc. Similarly, we've chucked out Science and learning and replaced it with Critical Theory, Gender Studies and utterly refute Biology.

I recall that about 30 years ago a team at Sheffield University studying the Gundestrup Cauldron concluded that it was Scythian. They were on several BBC tv documentaries stating that the Cauldron was not either from indigenous people living in what is now Denmark/Germanic or Celtic. They also stated that if you did not accept their theory it was because you're racist. Also the grafting of Ancient Egyptian culture in Early Welsh, Brythonic or Celtic isn't White Culture being forced on African culture but a negation of Welsh, British and White European culture. It's arguing that the African culture came to Brydein and has in some way been usurped by those evil colonialist white cultural appropriators. That all ancient Britons from the Paviland Lady (a man) to the blue eyed people at Cheddar Gorge or Whitehawk Woman were all black and "replaced" by white Invaders.

Oh the ice cream headache!!! Probably a good thing you were a wee bit hot under the collar in order to avoid brain freeze! Thank you for handling this so well.

I've never heard this theory before but goodness gracious people are really into their pseudohistory 😂 I'm so sorry you had to make this video to correct the ignorance, but I still found it super interesting!

wow that is the first i have heard of that Welsh and Hieroglyphs or Ancient Egyptian and i have just a minor in hieroglyphs and studied some welsh but i would never have put them two together ever so what ... wow ok sorry if i make some others uncomfortable but i agree with you on this...