Megan is Owen’s cousin. I translated as Megan yw cefnither Owen but according to duo lingo it should have been Cefnither Owen yw Megan. Is there a difference .
As far as I know, they’re both possible, but with a difference of emphasis.
Your version could be seen as Megan is Owen’s cousin (not Sioned).
Theirs suggests Megan is Owen’s cousin (not his sister).
In other words, in Welsh, putting something at the start of the sentence tends to emphasise it - but we’ve got to put something first, we can’t just start with yw and leave everything else till later! So one version has to be the normal, unemphatic one - and as far as I know it’s the Duolingo one, rather than yours (sorry).
Learner like yourself; always happy to be corrected if wrong.
1 Like
Diolch, that makes sense.
Just to expand on this, the unfocused construction would say Mae Megan yn gefnither Owen.
But what we have in Duolingo’s solution is a so-called identification sentence, a sort of linguistic equation (Megan = Owen’s cousin), in which both solutions are correct Welsh.
Duolingo just thinks the important information is that Megan is Owen’s cousin (and not his sister, for example, as Richard says). In my opinion Duolingo should have counted your sentence as correct, as the distinction isn’t possible to make in written English.
2 Likes