I’ve just started using the South Welsh SSIW after getting to the end of DUO and several years of South Learn Welsh courses, starting Canolrad in a couple of weeks.
I’m being put off a bit as ‘Eisiau’ (Dw i eisiau) for ‘want’ does not appear to be used, but instead ‘Moyn’ (Dw i’n moyn) for ‘to want’ is in the sentences. I don’t remember ever coming across it in the South Learn Welsh courses so it is throwing my concentration. I appreciate that one is a noun used with bod and the other is a verb-noun, but is this actually a word used a lot in South Wales? Is it more a North Wales thing? Any enlightenment appreciated.
It’s only on the South challenges so unlikely to be much of a North thing. I think some academic snobs consider moyn to be less than proper Cymraeg, maybe. It is absent from my Collins Welsh-English dictionary, anyway.
As I understand it, both moyn and eisiau (pronounced and therefore sometimes spelled as “isie”) are quite commonly used “in the wild” of South Wales. But if you’re more comfortable with one over the other, that’s fine. You will be understood.
I too had picked up “eisiau” (or rather “isio”, from my north Welsh family) and then did the southern SSiW course, which uses “moyn” (which you’ll hear a lot on Pobol y Cwm, say). I literally said “dw i eisiau” every time Iestyn and Cat said “dw i’n moyn”, and just moved on.
(There’ll be another little difference when you get to the negative forms - again, I just did my own thing and stuck to the forms I knew.)
Basically, you’ll end up using the one that you hear used most around you. They’re both in common use in the south, so it could be either depending on who you’re talking to, but it’s good for you to be aware of the other.
