Hi all,
In terms of a sentence like: ‘I need someone to practice with,’ would it be grammatically correct to say: ‘Mae isia i fi rhewen i ymarfer gyda’? It doesn’t sound right to my ears. Would the sentence structure/word order change for a statement like this?
Diolch!
I think not. In that case, you could simply turn it round with:
“I need to practice with someone”
“Mae isio i fi ymarfer gyda rhywun”
However, I suspect there should be a more general solution, but I don’t know what it is.
Maybe something like: “Mae isio rhywun i ymarfer gyda hi/fe”
“I need someone to practice with her/him”.
(sounds clunky in English, but might just work in Cymraeg!)
Diolch. I’ll keep that in mind.
In addition to Mike’s reply, you could say “Dw i angen rhywun sy’n ymarfer gyda fi”.
But yes, changing the word order around would be best for the “mae eisiau i fi…” construction.
You know I’m not even a bit of an expert here but this sounds the most correct in relationship of what @Karla wants the expression should be. So I’d go for this one …
This is correct for ‘I need someone who practices with me’, so not quite the same… 
Mike is on the money here - also, if you were starting off in Welsh (rather than trying to find an equivalent for a phrase in English) something like ‘Mae angen i mi ffeindio rhywun i mi ymarfer gyda nhw/fe/hi’…
This looks complicated … two “mi” in the sentence … would have get used to it.
Diolch! I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be a particularly simple sentence! 
I seem to remember that Gareth King breaks these sorts of sentences down into their different components, and then rejoins them in various ways to suit the particular sentence. I don’t have any examples to hand, but I found this (fearsomely long!) paper on the web, where someone (interestingly with a Japanese-looking name) compares what they call “P-stranding” (“Preposition stranding” I think) in both literary and colloquial Welsh. There is far more there than anyone would surely really want to know(!), but there are quite a few example sentences given.
Here is the link:
(If that link doesn’t work, try googling for “Preposition stranding in Welsh”).
and I found this example (page 127) for “efo” (same as “gyda”):
" y ffrind wnes i chwarae tenis efo"
This is compared with a similar sentence in literary Welsh which ends “efo fo”
(that would be the northern equivalent of “gyda fe”).
“the friend I played tennis with”
(or: “the friend I played tennis with him”).
The paper author says that pronouns at the end of sentences can be left out in colloquial Welsh (and I’ve certainly seen examples of that in written colloquial Welsh, e.g.
“…iddi.” where “iddi hi.” is understood.
Kind of suggests you could actually get away with “gyda” at the end, in colloquial Welsh.
(just to complicate the issue - sorry!).
(Edit: This seems to be a better link:
http://e.bangor.ac.uk/5122/3/Ryuichiro%20Hirata Finalised.pdf
)
Diolch yn fawr, that’s a very interesting (and complicated!) dissertation. It looks like the grammar is far more flexible than I initially thought.
The iddi one is a bit different, though, because the word iddi already encodes the hi-ness, if you know what I mean. Some prepositions never change (gyda fi, gyda fe, gyda hi) but some do depending on which pronoun comes after them (amdana’ i, amdano fe, amdani hi). So, with those ones, you can leave off the pronoun and let the ending of the preposition do the work. This is actually common in Fancy Welsh and isn’t colloquial at all (if anything, it’s Fancier to leave them off!). However, leaving the pronouns off the non-changing prepositions is definitely very colloquial - which is fine, but avoid it in formal writing and stuff.
Hi, Just a thought from a beginner:
English language purists/pedants might even question the original English version ending in the word “with”, as this is a hanging proposition. They may prefer “…practice with me” or “…with whom I can practice”. I suspect that Aran’s and Mike’s translations will reflect that.
Edit: I’ve just realised that this was from 2015 
No problem - people resurrect old threads all the time!
From what I know, that rule against ending a sentence with a preposition (in English) was invented in the nineteenth century, and is pretty much disregarded these days. It seems that in Welsh it actually makes a sentence sound abrupt and unfinished, to my ears anyway.
It could be cool to see if anyone can find any written examples of welsh sentences ending with an unfinished preposition
I’d be surprised to see written examples. The only time I hear it tends to be from children or young adults who are very much copying English construction - things like sa i’n gwybod pwy dw i’n mynd gyda which would have their teachers tearing their hair out 
I feel like I hear it quite often on Radio Cymru in interviews with ordinary people (or, say, sports players, but not people who speak Welsh professionally, so to speak - journalists and actors and politicians). It always rather sets my teeth on edge, which is a bit odd. I mean, I do think that that sort of syntactic loan is much more insidious and, in a way, dangerous than the odd licio or even lyfio here and there; but I find it odd that I seem to have developed such an instinctively judgmental reaction to something in a language I’m still far from fluent in. (Or “so far from fluent in it,” perhaps. Or “in which I am so far from fluent.” Etc.)
The “ending a sentence with a preposition” thing (in English) is what my fellow editors call a “zombie rule” - one of those things that was invented by someone like E.B. White and then imposed on generations as “wrong”, but isn’t really considered as such by linguists, editors, etc.
I hear it quite a lot in Welsh, especially from my younger family members from Gwynedd. I tend not to do it myself, but my Welsh is probably more formal than many people’s.
I don’t for one moment consider it to be a rule in English, and I think you’re absolutely right about Strunk & White (I remember someone on Language Log going through with a fine-toothed comb just how many times that manual flouted its own rules). So I am a little surprised at myself for having that kind of nails-down-a-blackboard reaction, as a learner, to something your actual speakers actually do. (Incidentally, I’m reminded of a video of Simon Roper talking about colloquial 16th century English, where people apparently missed the pronoun off something like “How much do you want for [them]?”… just after 7:30 here, if you’re interested https://youtu.be/6j18ZdlBSBs)
Ooh… a video about 16th century English? Ffab!! Diolch.
(I love that this forum is just the place to share this sort of really niche content…)