Gareth King's Grammar and Workbooks

Geiriadur yr Academi gives the portmanteau ffugwyddonol as the adjective, and although they don’t give a noun, I would construe that ffugwyddoniaeth might cut it. Not as succinct as Sci-Fi though! :sweat_smile:

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“Ffu-Gwy”? :wink:

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:rofl: Love it!

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Hmmm. Just tried a search for ffugwyddoniaeth and the Wicipedia page that was the top result is clearly using it as an equivalent of English “pseudo-science”…

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Guess we’d better stick to sai-ffai to avoid confusion :grin:

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Indeed, English steals a great deal of its vocabulary. Or borrows, if one takes “loanword” literally… but… when does the loan expire, and what shall we do then?!
Torpido ffoton is easy enough to remember, but there’s plenty more vocab I need if I’m to be a proper nerd yn Gymraeg.
I might want to talk about mundane life now and then too. Whatever I end up wanting to say, what better way to gain vocab than reading? :grinning: I love being able to justify my book habit with “It’s educational!”
The potential confusion between science fiction and fictional/pseudo science mentioned above is just the kind of thing that makes me wary of literal translations without input from fluent speakers.
I think of a Romanian immigrant who, speaking of breathing, said we “inspire” and then “expire”. It wasn’t an appropriate moment to interrupt, and then later it seemed such a silly, nitpicky thing to mention to him. After all, he was as they say Not Wrong.

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Very wise. And I think I do discuss this in the article on Dictionaries in Thinking Welsh.

Unless that was a dream.

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I went on gwales.com, picked a random sci-fi book, and then toggled the language of the website from English to Cymraeg.
Within the book’s description it said “Nofel sci-fi,” (score one for Google!) however, there was also this at the end:
Mae’r teitl yma yn y categori a/neu is-gategori canlynol:

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This is an excellent tactic - I do it myself all the time when trying to work out the Welsh for a phrase that hasn’t yet hit the dictionaries or the various specialist terminology lists. And I think your choice of gwales.com as a website to try it on for sci-fi was inspired.

But I’m not sure that you can thank Google for it - it should be the case that the copy on the website has been provided in both languages by the organisation (rather than relying on Google to do the deed). So when I try this trick I always make sure that I pick a site that I know will have been carefully prepared/translated by actual Welsh speakers (as you did here), rather than taking up Google’s offer of translation.

(The inconsistency you noticed is probably that “ffuglen wyddonol” is the official term, which Gwales has chosen to use, and “sci-fi” is the term that people probably use more often, which the publisher has chosen to use when writing their blurb, and which Gwales has just copied and pasted.)

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Yes, when I said “score one for Google” I meant, Google got this one at least partially right - people do use “sci-fi” when speaking/writing Welsh.
I did indeed choose gwales.com because I knew they’d have written the Welsh themselves; I used the button at the top right that said “Cymraeg”. And then of course I got a pop-up from Google offering to translate the page into English for me! LOL.
Having Google translate a page is much the same risk as typing things into their Translate page/app, except that you might hope that with a larger chunk / more context it will do better… maybe.