Hello Catrin, thanks for your answer and for this thread!
I admit mutations are still very confusing for me. And I believe I must have also emanated some confusion in my questions!
One question was about barn/farn - which I think is the one @delawarejones answered.
The other was related to my perception of the pronunciation:
I see Beirniadu = bairn-yad-ee.
But I hear “bairn-yaT-ee”
I did the South course and I’m not familiar with Northern accent, nor yours, so I was trying to figure out the differences.
Note: however while I was writing this, I see/hear today word “adolygiad” - which I happen to have heard before in other accents - and now I hear “adolyagaT” again here. So it must be an accent thing!
It may well be the recording, or the device you are listening on, or possibly the fact that my mouth was too close to the microphone, or a combination of all three! But pronouncing ‘d’ as a ‘t’ isn’t known as a characteristic of the northern accent/dialect. It is though a characteristic of some dialects in south Wales, for instance when you hear the familiar term of endearment but or butty it comes from the American ‘bud’ or ‘buddy’. There are other examples as well which @Iestyn may be able to outline for you. Hope this helps!
I also noticed that when I started learning Welsh! To my Finnish/Italian ears the Welsh d definitely sounded more like t, and t sounded more like ts. I’m pretty sure that that happens more in the north. Listening to southern dialects now I can clearly hear that the d and t sounds are softer (though still hard compared to Finnish/Italian/English, I think), and d sounds more like what I would consider a d in Finnish or Italian.
For us, the Southern ‘d’ tends more to sound like a ‘t’ than the Northern ‘d’.
This happens often when it’s preceded by a ‘u’ because the southern ‘u’ sounds more like and ‘ee’ and the northern ‘u’ sounds more like ‘uh’. So the ‘ee’ sound before the ‘d’ tends to sharpen it, where as the ‘uh’ sound before a ‘d’ tends to soften it.
Right, @CatrinLliarJones, I tend to forget the influence of technical aspects in such subtle differences!
However, now I know that @Novem in the beginning had pretty much the same impression, I suspect it’s more a matter of perception, rather than in the way you pronounce words.
The only times I remember hearing “d” so much like a “t” right away, in a Southern accent, was “stryd”.
By the way I find pretty hard to distinguish “dd” from “f”, and sometimes “th” from “ll”, and emphasys as we said somewhere else i this Forum
so it’s probably a matter of getting used to it all
I think this basically goes back to the thing I was saying elsewhere about post-aspiration (the little extra puff of breath) on p/t/c sounds in English and Welsh.
We’ve got three different sounds here (broadly speaking – I’m sure you could do a more detailed/nuanced analysis):
T/D Voiceless, Post-aspirated = English/Welsh initial t, Icelandic t, doesn’t exist in Italian
T/D Voiceless, Un-post-aspirated = English t in ‘stop’, Icelandic d, Italian t; doesn’t exist on its own in English
T/D Voiced, Un-post-aspirated = English/Welsh/Italian d
It sounded to me on the recording of @CatrinLliarJones saying ‘beirniad’ as though the final -d wasn’t really voiced – especially the first time she said it. Now that might or might not be an artefact of the recording/playback, but I’m sure it’s something Catrin wasn’t aware of doing; and because it still lacks the post-aspiration of English/Welsh stand-alone t (probably what @Novem heard as t sounding like ts), which is distinctive, it still sounds more like a d to us. However, it’s going to make it sound like t to someone used to the sounds of Italian.
In this respect English and Welsh seem to pattern more with Icelandic, where it’s the aspiration that makes the important difference, than with Italian and most other languages, where it’s the voice – notice that Icelandic t is like English t, while Icelandic d is basically the same as Italian t.
…But I really don’t know about the different d sounds in different Welsh accents
Oh thanks for linking the other thread, I remembered we had talked about “t” and “d” before, but wasn’t able to find it and could not remember all details!
Besides that, it’s interesting that in the recording of “beirniad” it sounds as if the final -d wasn’t really voiced to you, while it sounds like a very clear “t” to me!
p.s. gotta find out more about Icelandic…
p.p.s Oh no, I spent several days in the presence of native English speakers and I forgot the cigarette paper test!!
Some of that is just recording/playback technology – I spent the early part of Level 1 thinking it was bodd i when @aran said bo’ fi (because I’d been very good about not looking at anything written, but I’d misheard) and then spent the next two or three challenges saying "bodd i – no, dammit – bo’ fi " in every gap, and then running out of time…
Thank you for the clarification. I’ve never used “critic” in a legal sense. Only as someone who reviews food or films.
Since you asked about kitchen items… What are the words for spatula, collander/strainer, whisk and is a butter dish a “dysgl menyn” and tea kettle a “tegell te”?
To a certain extent, I think the sound shift from “d” to “t” happens when the speaker is trying to make sure you actually hear the “d”. It is such a soft sound on its own that we tend to emphasize the “plosive” part when we want to make sure it is heard. But that very thing makes the sound harder and more like “t”.
Hey, the food+cooking section of the vocabulary is one of my favorite (too)!
Ever since @siaronjames gave me this link https://www.youtube.com/user/cwmnidatv in a post (an answer to some question elsewhere in this forum), I started watching Becws show clips on YouTube, and they work great because they have subtitles!
I started just a few days ago to be more “scientific” so I try to transcribe the words as I hear them, then look up for them in my brand new dictionary (to find how they should really be written), and collect them all in a spreadsheet.
Not as good as singing along songs, but pretty good fun too!
A lot of words are basically the same as English or even very similar to Italian, but written in Welsh alphabet!
p.s. I understand it’s “opinion”, but isn’t it judgement as well? “sai’n pasio unrhyw farn” about recipes here, would make sense?
Same for me, but the other way round with the whole byddai fe/be fyddet “family”.
I always threw in a “be”+ an undefined number of “fe” to confuse the counterpart (still do, really!) until I figure out which is which!
