About Him/It

I hear the word AMDANI quite often. I understand it to mean “about it”

What are the words for "about me’; “about you”; “about him”; “about her”, “about them”

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Yes, that’s because Welsh uses the female form when speaking about an unnamed, unknown or abstract entity. The personal pronoun hi is often omitted in these cases.

The other forms are (in the usual order)
amdana i, amdanat ti, amdano fe/fo, amdani hi, amdanon ni, amdanoch chi, amdanyn nhw

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And just to add to @Hendrik’s point, because the end of the forms amdani and amdano basically are just the pronouns hi and (in the north) fo, people often miss the pronouns out with those forms: so it’s amdano (fe/fo) and amdani (hi), pronouns optional. Learners sometimes think that getting to miss off the pronoun might be lazy Welsh, but in this case it’s actually ‘better’ Welsh (for certain values of ‘better’).

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Diolch Hendrik

Diolch Richard

Love how you’ve put this! With my linguist hat on, I would probably say “a more formal register” (and when I take off that hat I would probably say “posher”). But yours works well!

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“X… for certain values of X” (implying various shades of “this might not actually be true,” including “but is probably the conventional wisdom”) is a common snowclone in our household & friendship group, and tbh I thought it was fairly Internet-wide.

(If you haven’t come across “snowclone”, it’s basically a stereotyped verbal formula into which one can slot variable elements to fit a given situation. I think it originated on Language Log: it refers to the way any linguistically ill-informed article about specialist vocabulary inevitably says, “Just as the Eskimos (or Inuit, if they’ve caught up a bit) have over 100 words for ‘snow’, so too do the X have lots of words for Y.”)

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It may well be … I don’t get out much! :rofl:

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