Bamboozled by dweud/gweud

Welsh General / Questions
#1

So, I’ve ‘done’ all of the new course. I’m now up to lesson 2 of the Level 3 in the old course. I’m doing Automagic too and, 32 hours in, can remember the topics as they came up in the new course.

All good. But what on earth am I to make of using dweud/gweud??

I’m fully on board with the huge dialect variation in Welsh. I also understand the contractions and variations in spelling of tense suffixes (e.g. -ais vs.-es for past tense, first person singular), but when you have sometimes three quite different versions across the various bits of the SSIW platform, it can leave you bamboozled!

Also, not having any written references in the old course material makes it even more challenging for me, as I think I’m a learner who benefits from subconsciously ‘seeing’ the word (its spelling) in my head, as I’m using it.

Dwedodd; wedodd; ddwedodd - argh! Then add in the short form future tense, third person singular from lesson 2, Level 3, old course, and I am LOST! Wedydd? I can’t even find anywhere to confirm to me how that is spelled - though I acknowledge that it is a contraction/derivation from the original grammar!

I think that one disadvantage maybe is non-native learners not learning the very formal, fully spelled, versions of verb structures and forms from the outset. I realise that SSIW is exactly that, Say something in Welsh, with this amazing learning model getting us to speak Welsh as others actually do. But that absence of formal grammatical knowledge can be a challenge to me sometimes - as in, I’m fine to say what I should say, but it would help me to understand where the contraction/variation etc has come from.

REQUEST
Does anyone have a link to any online/paper resources that I could tap into, to try to help me navigate these current choppy waters? A digestible, but useful explanation of how the tense versions are formed and which I could/should use?

I absolutely adore learning my Welsh, but feel that I’ve reached a bit of a roadblock with moving from a decent grounding to being able actually to converse ‘properly’ with some fluency…

Thanks in anticipation of help from the wonderful Hive Mind of the forum.

Ben
:slight_smile:

#2

One source for quick’n’basic ready reference is the Wikipedia page on Colloquial Welsh Morphology - scroll down to the bit on verbs to find that your future ending is -ith (often -iff in the South). Colloquial Welsh morphology - Wikipedia
If you’re reading, and come across more formal forms, there’s a matching page on Literary Welsh Morphology, which may be useful.
You can also look up dweud on Wiktionary, where it lists Northern deud and Southern gweud as options, and gives you Colloquial and Literary conjugations:
dweud - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
For proper reference I’d refer you Gareth King’s grammar or his various other coursebooks and workbooks - but for quick online resolution of simple queries, these are the pages/sites I tend to turn to first.

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#3

Amazing. Thank you :pray:t3:

Ben

#4

@benjamin-stanhope don’t forget that you’re also a member of SSiW Community Chat Slack group where you can ask all kinds of questions. There is a Q&A session at 10:00 on Weds, but if you can’t get to that, you’re very welcome to post questions in the #q-and-a-questions thread.

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