Yr un ola - dw i’n addo i chi!
Last one - I promise!
This one made me laugh even more, and is also packed with interesting linguistic items.
Gareth! is expecting the famous actor Ioan Gruffudd, but instead gets his mate from Caernarfon, who’s a carpenter/joiner (saer coed). But he manages to think up a carpentry-related question about the film ‘Titanic’ for him!
Note:
use of na instead of mai for focused ‘that’:
Pwy oedd yn deud na Ioan Gruffudd oedd yn dod? Who told (you) that Ioan Gruffudd was coming (on)?
use (in the game Be 'di gorau Gareth) of ta instead of neu for ‘or’ when offering two options, for example:
cacan ta bisged? cake or biscuit? te ta coffi? tea or coffee?
Lle ewn ni?Where shall we go? - shows gog use of Lle? for Ble?, and shows common gog alternative ewn ni for standard and hwntw awn ni.
Gei di fynd wan, YwsYou can go now, Yws - shows fixed SM on verbs with endings, even in statements with no statement particle; shows cael used to give permission; shows wan as a common pronunciation of rŵan.
You can read about these in the Grammar, §§492, 512, 416, 305d, 305b, 340, 407. See? I don’t make it up!
At the end, after arranging to go for a pint, he says to camera:
Heblaw fod y person rong wedi cerdded i fewn, aeth hwnna’n OK, do? Apart from the wrong person having walked in, that went OK, didn’t it?
Diolch, I enjoyed that, really funny. And I agree that his stuff and Swnami “yr un peth”, at least to my “non music obsessive” ears seeing as I haven’t progressed from MOR stuff yet.
You have given me a target to aim at! Currently, my Welsh is not up to these clips! I shall actually go back to learning some and aim at enjoying Gareth y mwnci!
There’s another layer of joke here. Ifan Sion Davies, who Gareth accuses Yws of stealing from Swnami, actually names Yws as his main musical influence. There’s a famous picture online of a young and star struck (pre-teen) Ifan with Yws during his Frizbee days. He’s got used to it now, but in the early days of the Yws Gwynedd band (around the time of the Meifod Eisteddfod) it was possible to see on Ifan’s face when they appeared on stage together a genuine look of “I can’t believe this is actually happening!”.
I’d also like to point out something I’ve just noticed that is relevant to another thread we had on here recently about achos… and pam…? being followed by a ‘that’- clause. Listen to Gareth! when he says 'You’re a big fan of Bob Dylan, aren’t you?, and Yws Gwynedd says yes, and then Gareth! says
Felly pam BOD chdi’n swnio fel Sŵnami a dim Bob Dylan? So why do you sound like Sŵnami and not Bob Dylan?
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told off for using the word rong. I picked it up off young people in Porthmadog when I attended a series of gigs there almost a decade ago, and I’m sticking to it. I probably wouldn’t use it when talking to my daughter’s teachers, though. Oh, and ddo, too!
Yeah, stick to it! It’s a well established loanword and completely natural among native speakers. It’s the language police that don’t like it, of course…
Anghywir is almost one of those words that marks one out as a learner actually, don’t you think? Prysur is another one, in my experience.
Similarly ddo which is nice and convenient and used as an interjection almost, as it is in English, where there isn’t a neat Welsh equivalent anyway. (You could say er hynny, I suppose - but that’s way too formal anyway). Nope - stick to ddo !!
Annoyingly as well, despite being a pretty decent musician - a suprisingly good footballer, Ywain Gwynedd is a really nice guy (damn him!) and a must follow on social media for Welsh learners
Is that how you spell it? I was going to go with fishu. I think it’s one of those words that doesn’t really exist in the written language, so doesn’t really have a spelling.
This here is interesting though, isn’t it? The famous English phonetician and philologist Henry Sweet did a study of spoken North Welsh (Nant Gwynant ) in 1884, which is to be found in his Collected Short Papers that I’ve just come across. Look what he (sensibly, I think!) said at the end about English loanwords in native Welsh speech:
