Bore da/question

Generally, an adjective before a noun will make that noun soft mutate where possible. hen dy, hen ddyn, hen ddraig, hen win, prif ddinas, hoff bau

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A rather interesting take on mutations from the BBC Catchphrase site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/catchphrase/ysbyty_brynaber/lessons/language/lang86.shtml

You might have noticed already, but we just love mutating in Welsh! In fact we love it so much that we even bother with loan words which begin with ‘ch’, like checio (to check) which we would mutate to jecio.

We hear Chris saying:

Chi moyn i mi jecio ble mae fe?
Do you want me to check where he is?

He’s felt the need to mutate after the preposition ‘i’ of course, even though he needn’t really have bothered!!

Another example might be chargo (to charge)

Ga’i jargio fy ffon yma?
Can I charge my phone here?

If you find yourselves mutating the sound ‘ch’ naturally, you’ll know you’ve cracked mutations at last!!

(Of course, Gareth King would say he’s not mutating after the preposition “i” in that first example, but after the notional subject, “mi”, and in the 2nd example after the subject “i”… )

Hmmm, the welsh sound ‘ch’ is entirely different the the english sound ‘ch’, which would be better rendered with ‘tsi’, I think. Interesting how that mutates to ‘j’ - is that the english ‘j’ pronunciation? Sigh, languages never stand stil…

Edit: my dictionary has ‘siarsio’ for charge, rather than ‘chargo’, I like that much better

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I’m guessing “chargio” is a bit of Wenglish and the “ch” and the mutation to “j” are probably rendered in the English/Wenglish pronunciation as well.

I’m wondering if whoever wrote that was just getting a bit carried away…Welsh “ch” never mutates does it?
(but I’m learning never to say “never” about anything to do with Welsh. :slight_smile: )

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Diolch Craig–Challenges 11 and 12 now make sense. I was trying to figure out if I was missing something in the logic or structure of the language, rather than understanding that ‘hen’ is an exception.

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I think what is implied is that tsiarsio -> dsiarsio which, in Anglicised terms would be char-jo -> jar-jo. And I think this is altogether normal and natural.

Imagine a friend has some chips. Wouldn’t you naturally ask “Ga i un o dy jips”? :wink:

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“Ga i un o dy sglods?” :blush:

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That explanation makes sense to me, thanks Rob. I would just take the sglods, though :smile:

“Paid â dwyn fy nhsips!” :wink:

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I wouldn’t know where to start trying to pronounce “nhsips”!

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Start with fy
say fyn (English vun) give little short ‘h’ sound. Then say ‘sips’
I can’t think of any situation in which that mutation would be vocalised alone because it’s hard to do. 'Nghariad is much easier!!
@aran and @Iestyn do please help @gruntius if my efforts are no use!!

I think you’ll find that Rob was joking - there’s no such word as ‘nhsips’ :sunny:

That’s why ‘nghariad’ seems easier to say. I suspect that if anyone did mutate on ‘fy chips’ it’d probably end up more like ‘fy ships’… :sunny:

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I saw someone on Facebook suggesting that we should adopt the letter x to represent the English ch (thing church) sound. It would be easy to explain that X mutates to J in the soft mutation (a totally natural thing!), and it would avoid the “over-thinking” that might lead to wondering if the t of tsips mutates in other ways.

In the case of “fy nhsips”, there is a problem that fy t… is an unnatural thing to force yourself to do, but that nhsips is obnviously just an impossible tongutwister. I suspect that in the wild and not thinking about it, I probably say “yn jips i” (It’s quite common in the south to replace mutations with softs, as in “dwi’n byw yn Gaerdydd” (should be yng Nghaerdydd), or “glywes i ddim” (should be chlywes i ddim).

Which all goes to show that you shouldnt worry about getting mutations “right” in speech, because you’ll always meet natural speakers who do it differently to the text books!

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  1. Firstly, to @aran, I should have read the thread and realised what came before what I tried to answer!! I can now see the joke!!
  2. to @Iestyn I totally understand the southern habit… I already knew that you don’t use the letter ‘h’ if it is conceivably possible to avoid it!!!

Laughing aside, I hadn’t really thought about mutating Wenglish, but I guess it happens naturally if it is easy and doesn’t lead to a twisted tongue!! :smiley:

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It’s hard for the non-mutating brain to see mutations as anything other than a grammatical foible that must be learnred. But to mutationistas, the changes are as natural as any other part of the language, and the rules that you see in the grammar books are attempts to explain what happens in real life.

So, yes, Wenglish gets “the treatment”, if it’s Wenglish that has become a de facto part of Welsh, and depite what you see in the grammar books, foreign place names often get it as well!

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And that I really rather love. :heart:

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@Iestyn
and

Diollch yn fawr!!
I have a habit of ‘softing’ when not strictly correct and sometimes ‘aspir…er…anting?’… when probably incorrect. Would people notice?

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Notice? Probably. Care? Sometimes depending on the person. Would it affect a conversation? Absolutely not. Just carry on like it never happened and you’ll do it less and less as time goes on.

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As do I - well the softening, at least. I find myself sometimes softening the word after the one that should have gone, as though my mind has spotted a missed mutation, and pops it in at the next available opportunity. I think the aspirantisationing, or whatever, is probably more noticeable, because natural speakers tend to incorrectly not-mutate, rather than over-mutating. But as Gruntius says - really really don’t worry about it, because if you’re speaking that’s all that matters. You won;t be misunderstood, your “mistakes” won’t be remembered (and often won’t be noted, or will be accepted as “another way of saying…”), and you’ll come across as the Welsh speaker that you are obviously becoming. So, do it!

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