You must be related to my missus… 
BTW, do Gogs say “rŵan 'te”? I think I might have heard it very occasionally on RaR, but it doesn’t seem as common as “nawr 'te”, or maybe I just notice the latter one more.
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Tudur Owen says it a fair amount on the radio, and I’ve got a friend of Ynys Môn/Liverpool Welsh background who is very fond of it.
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Does tea run through her veins too? Fine woman!
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I let the side down! Always have. I don’t like tea. In fact i positively dislike tea! Black coffee, dark roast for me! Espresso Italiano yum!
I tried hard to try to understand this before I read what was written below the picture. It took me a while to work out “Ti’n taxi” exactly because I didn’t think you could contract the “yn” in this way. I would never have figured out that “goro” was “gorfod”. I’m learning Hwntw… I did get that"isda" came from “eistedd”, and “fo” was from “efo”, but the “so ti’n” didn’t make sense because I took that to be the negative. I’m apparently nowhere near ready to go near Caernarfon 
And me…tea most definitely runs through my veins! I like the occasional cup of coffee, but I drink a lot of tea every day. Nawr te…amser i gael dishgled o de 
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Wi’n credu bod eisiau tebot mawr arnon ni!
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Ah, but that’s because you were reading it - if you had heard it instead, it probably would have made more immediate sense.
A lot of Welsh speakers write in this texty/shorthand way. Although written Welsh is fairly phonetic anyway, this type of spelling reflects the way words often run into each other or are shortened naturally during speech. (and remember there is a character limit on Twitter, so writing out in full sometimes wouldn’t fit into one tweet anyway!) It does take some getting used to, but don’t let it scare you out of coming to Caernarfon - you can come and have a panad with me!
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Yeah, what Siaron says. You’d be surprised how easy it is to make those small adjustments to what you already know, and how happy Welsh speakers are to meet you halfway, too.
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Yes, you are probably right! When I watch Rownd a Rownd with Welsh subtitles, I think, “There’s so much here I don’t understand”, but if I just listen, I follow a lot more of it.
If I ever get to Wales, I would like go to Caernarfon, and I’d be delighted to have a panad with you!
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If I can chip in…Most polyglots (of which I am not one) will agree that the hardest part of learning a language is the vocabulary. At least thats what Steve Kaufmann and Richard Simcott, both renowned polyglots say. I would say, without a shadow of a doubt this has been true for me. It’s been a hard slog but I realised that I just had to sit down with a good novel and my dictionary app and slug it out. That is how I acquired a lot of my vocab. Its been hard, especailly when most of my exposure to welsh has been through radio and S4C, so I don’t get the audio reinforcement that people surrounded by Welsh speakers do. Also as there are fewer shared cognates with the romance languages or Germanic languages, the vocab is much, much less intuitive compared to Spanish, which I am learning at the moment.
Considering this, I have to say that it is rather frustrating to come across speakers who say things such as ‘suggesto’ or ‘rehearso’. And when did ‘iwso’ become so popular!? I heard it on Un Bore Mercher and thought, what the hell, it’s now in the main stream Welsh media!? Welsh has beautiful words and sounds, which learners works hard at to learn. I think they should be used orally and not confined to written Cymraeg.
Oh well as the saying goes.
Gwell Cymraeg slac na Saesneg slic. (irony?)
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Plenty of people in Wales would say “gorro” for “got to” in English. I can picture Chris Coleman saying something like “we gorro win this game”. If in this case it does come from gorfod then thats quite interesting.
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Iwsio has actually been around for a long time. A friend of mine is a first language speaker who works as a translator for local government, and used to - in a friendly manner - tell me off for using defnyddio in informal speech because it was the more formal word.
(now I swing between the two depending which pops onto my tongue first!)
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My Spanish intercambio friend (we swapped Welsh/Spanish) used to roll his eyes and tell me to think of the Welsh any time I got stuck…
Eglwys
Pont
Lladron
Braich
Môr
Cwningen
Trist
Ffenest
Tir…
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As a group, we need to be careful not to get “frustrated” with natural speech. It doesn’t always get met well.
There’s a lot of picking and choosing what’s acceptable to dysgwyr. Iwsio vs ffaelu for example.
Both borrowed. Both with alternatives. To my ear they’re all fine. “Watsio” used to “frustrate” me, but it’s so natural and I catch myself saying it sometimes. Then I realised, who am I to get annoyed with words just because they sound similar?
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Absolutely, I agree - and I think the SSiW ‘don’t worry about it’ mantra deals with that much better than the more traditional courses. Via SSiW there is exposure to many more speech patterns/vocab differences whereas the traditional courses tend* to teach along the lines of ‘this is the word for …’ which then (I feel) generates those awkward situations** of a) a natural Welsh speaker becoming embarrased and apologising for their Welsh or b) a natural Welsh speaker becoming intolerant of ‘learners who think they know better’
- generalising here - I know there are exceptions
**ok, these situations are relatively rare, but still, they do no one any favours.
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There are even more in Catalan! But there are also other ways in which other (especially Romance) languages can help more indirectly. I had an “Aha!” moment the other day, reading something (possibly my Welsh post-apocalyptic teenfic), when someone said something like “Dw i’n cael yr argraff…” etc. And I thought to myself, “I get the… Didn’t I see that word on a website the other day? Yes – it was a link to a printable version of the content! So, I get the… print!? Printing? – Oh! Printing press! Impression! I get the impression!”
And then I moved on. But now I shall remember both the ‘print’ command for the web page and “Dw i’n cael yr argraff.”
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Ah, natural contextual osmosis-driven language acquisition - you’re in the home straight…
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Latin influence!
Can I say Tasai fo ond yn gywir ? Would it mean what I want it to, without being Humpty-Dumpty-ish about it?
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