The Vineyard That Outlived Them

Exiled from Wales for his Catholic faith, Gruffydd Robert spent the rest of his life in the service of the Church in Milan, never once returning home. There, in a dialogue set in a vineyard and voiced by himself and his uncle, he wrote the first grammar the Welsh language had ever had, working on it for nearly three decades even after his uncle drowned and his patron Cardinal Borromeo died, keeping both men alive and arguing gently on the page. Harmonia sets his story beside two others separated from him by centuries and oceans, Sequoyah of the Cherokee Nation and Uyaquq of the Yup'ik, each of whom built a written form for a language that had only ever lived between a speaker and a listener, so it would never again depend on any one person staying alive to carry it. Transcript available at: https://harmonia.email/podcast-episode/vineyard-outlived-them Share and read comments: https://harmonia.email/podcast-comments?field_podcast_feed_value=harmonia_s_history&from_node=423