‘Got’ is superfluous in the last example unless she went to get the children from somewhere. ‘She has three children’ is perfectly adequate otherwise.
You are missing the point that (the other) Gareth wanted to make, i.e. illustrating different qualities of “incorrect”. “She has got three children” is a perfectly valid and correct English sentence. It may not be British English, and it may be stylistically inferior in your eyes, but that doesn’t make it incorrect (as opposed to “She has get three childs”)
2 Likes
That’s why I said it was superfluous. I wasn’t implying it’s right or wrong to use ‘got’. Maybe my message was too concise.
What Hendrik said.
2 Likes
I’m looking at Gweiadur conjugation tables and the names of different tenses are doing my head in. I never took Latin in school, and the grammar side of my English classes was… lacking. (My ex-teacher grandmother and my parents taught me all sorts that school never did, but not in a very formal or structured way.) So I can look at the English examples to see what the tense is doing, and go from there… mostly.
But anyway, in Dysgu Cymraeg classes, I’ve recently been presented with basai where I had learned byddai from the audio courses here. (I chose “south” for both SSiW and DC, if it matters.) Gweiadur’s tables both confirm that byddai is “officially” correct for the meaning of “He/she/it would be” (apparently it’s Conditional/Imperfect Simple tense, or in Cymraeg, Amhenodol) and also introduced a new puzzle. According to these tables, basai is Pluperfect Simple, or Gorberffaith Syml tense, and means “He/she/it had been”… and the Past Perfect Continuous, or Gorffenol Parhaol Gorffenedig tense roedd e/o/hi wedi bod yn bod also means “He/she/it had been” - the English examples are identical. So, what is the difference between those last two tenses? Surely there must be a difference or they wouldn’t have different names? Can anyone tell me where each would appear and how the usage differs?
By the way, I’ve no idea at all whether it matters, but in class my tutor refers to basai etc. as “Amodol” tense. Can’t find that one in a Gweiadur table! Life would be so much simpler if everyone would agree on the terminology; I don’t know whether in this case, the difference of terminology might be connected to the different usage. Amodol seems to have a narrower meaning than amhenodol, though I’ve never heard either word spoken in a sentence out in the wild, so I don’t feel 100% confident of that assessment, either!
If all this is laid out neatly in a Gareth King book already, please point me to the book and page number!
@verity-davey it looks like you’re tying yourself in knots with terminology!
Amodol is the general name for the ‘conditional’ tense (sometimes called mood) and it’s usually associated with “would”, e.g. “I would go out, if it weren’t raining”, “She would like that, thanks!”
It’s also used for repeated actions in the past, e.g. “He would arrive late to school every morning” where it’s equivalent to the Imperfect - “He used to arrive late to school every morning”
In Welsh, there are two forms - one based on bas and the other based on bydd - and they can both be used for the first “conditional” situation, but only the bydd form is used for the repeated actions in the past.
Baswn/byddwn i’n mynd mas/allan, tasai hi ddim yn bwrw glaw (sometimes in casual Welsh the ‘wn’ ending for the first person becomes ‘en’ but it means the same thing.)
But only Byddai fe/fo’n cyrraedd yn hwyr i’r ysgol bob bore
2 Likes