Q: What difference does it make how we pronounce the name Mabon? I mean, MAYbon, mAHbon… toMAYto, toMAHto! Who cares? It’s not hurting anyone, right?
A: Wrong. It is harmful to Welsh culture, and Welsh people do care. Why? Wales has been suffering under English colonialism since they lost their independence in the late 13th century… and this after the earlier Norman invasions, and the conquering of Britain by the Romans even before that. There is so much that can be said about this and the ongoing cultural and social impact it has had in Wales, but I want to focus on language right now.
There has been a long-standing campaign by the English to eradicate the Welsh language. This isn’t just some insult that occurred in the medieval period that people should get over, but something that persisted into the modern period — something that occurred in living memory. To understand this, at least in part, one must research “The Treachery of the Blue Books” from the 19th century. A summation can be found HERE.
This report greatly disparaged the Welsh language, saying “The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects.” (The Blue Books pt 2, no. 9, p. 66). The relevant page from this report, called “The Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales”, is provided below.
The grandparents of living Welsh people had to endure the “Welsh Not” in their schools… a twisted kind of hot potato where a wooden sign or token engraved with the letters “WN” would be given to a child caught speaking Welsh in school. That wooden token would be passed to the next child who spoke Welsh, and then the next… and at the end of the school day, the child still in possession of the “Welsh Not” would receive some form of corporal punishment from their teacher. In this way, the children were not only turned against their language, but were turned against each other.
A Welsh Not on display at St Fagans National Museum of History. 1852. It was used at Pontgarreg School, Llangrannog. Mx. Granger, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
In the face of all of this, Welsh language activists have fought HARD to revitalize their language in the 20th and 21st century, and are well on their way to meeting their goal to have 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050. https://nation.cymru/opinion/why-the-revival-of-welsh-became-a-model-for-minority-languages-across-the-globe
Speaking Welsh in Wales is a matter of cultural pride and an act of rebellion against colonialism. Respecting the Welsh language and listening to the concerns of Welsh speakers regarding the use of their language and other cultural pillars is, therefore, especially critical for those of us outside of the culture.
When we dismiss Welsh concerns as unimportant, twist ourselves into knots justifying our right to misappropriate Welsh cultural figures, and persist in consciously mispronouncing words in a language that is precious to its people after becoming SO imperiled not so long ago, we are perpetuating the wrongs of colonialism. We are harming Welsh culture and its people.
It DOES matter.
Don’t be that person.
(Oh, and it’s MAH-bon. Click HERE to hear Mabon pronounced by Mhara Starling, a native Welsh speaker.)
And here’s the thing:
Sometimes we are wrong. We — all of us — make mistakes. We make choices based on limited information. We learn new things and our thought process evolves over time such that the things we held as true in the past no longer aligns with what we know or how we think in the present.
We lose no honor (if anything, the opposite is true) when we amend a statement, admit an error, or explain a thought process while conceding that — in the presence of new information — our previous conclusions no longer hold up.
Doubling down and stubbornly defending one’s position by making spurious justifications founded on misconceptions, and/or claiming that the error was part of an underlying divine plan that us foolish pedantic mortals could never truly understand — all so one needn’t admit having been wrong (about something one has repeatedly been told is both inaccurate and culturally disrespectful) is truly WILD to me…!
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FWIW, this post arose out of conversations on the FB account of the author who first used Mabon on the Wheel of the Year. As of this writing, he is doubling down both on his use of Mabon as the name of the Neo-Pagan holiday of the Autumn Equinox (while pulling in spurious historical and archaeological “proofs” in a strange attempt to retcon his reasons for making this choice back in the 70s) as well as employing colonialist justifications to absolve himself and others from consciously choosing to continue to pronounce Mabon as MAY-bon. I’ve written about the appropriation issues of using Mabon’s name for the Autumn Equinox in various places in the past. HERE is a blog post I wrote a few years ago that addresses some of the issues around this.