Although the SSi Methodology focuses on listening and speaking, it’s quite common for people to become curious about the grammar behind what they’re learning and want to ask questions about it … or just to make some comments from their observations.
Rather than you having to hunt about the forum to find such things, this is a special topic for those who enjoy grammatical discussion and would like to delve deeper.
To start you off - a frequent question is: Can you recommend a grammar or text book where I can learn more?
Our answer to that is always that you can’t go wrong with books by Gareth King. He has produced workbooks at beginner and intermediate level Welsh, more comprehensive books explaining the grammar, and his latest books - Thinking Welsh and Working Welsh - give a lot of explanations and examples of Welsh grammar and language use that commonly mystify or surprise learners.
So here you are Grammar Fans! A topic especially for you!
Thanks so much for setting up a space for us grammar gremlins
I’ve always struggled a bit with knowing exactly when to use “sydd.” I understand it’s a kind of clause connector—roughly meaning “who/which/that is” (I think), but I feel like I get it wrong (or at least half-wrong!) about 50% of the time.
Yes, that’s right, though it won’t necessarily translate as those directly.
You can think of it as a+mae (you can say a oedd or a fydd, or a ‘any other verb’, but not a mae) and then any place where you would normally have mae preceded by who/which/that needs a sy/sydd instead.
e.g. the man who was asking = y dyn a oedd yn gofyn
the man who will be asking/who will ask = y dyn a fydd yn gofyn
but the man who is asking/who asks = y dyn sy’n gofyn
It’s not just 3rd person present, although that is where it is mostly used, it also applies to the present tense in general depending on the construction. For instance, in an emphasised sentence like “I’m asking” (it is I who is asking), you’d have *fi sy’n gofyn" and that applies to ti, fo/fe, hi, ni, chi, nhw too.
Pobol Y Cwm! Can’t take it too seriously but it’s entertaining, and 25-ish minutes is a nice episode length if you need to spend that time concentrating hard to understand.
Of course, there are subtitles if you want them. I try to get as much as I can without subtitles first, and then watch it again with the subs to understand the rest.
This is one of those things I’ve picked up without knowing why! Thanks so much to @christopher-14 for asking a really interesting question, and of course to @siaronjames for such a clear answer.
Now I’ve learned something new, can I go back to bed?
For those interested in the question of what pronoun to use, i.e. hi or fe/fo when talking about a third person and you don’t know their gender, I noted this in the S4C news online this morning:
Aethpwyd a’r athletwr i’r ysbyty, ond fe fuon nhw farw ddydd Mercher, meddai’r trefnwyr.
It’s interesting to see the use of the passive past - aethpwyd - but also that they use fe fuon nhw farw mirroring the increasingly common English use of “they died” for a single person when it’s not known, or not to be revealed, if the person was a man or a woman.
Being picky though, there’s a to bach missing - aethpwyd â’r
Apologies if this is in wrong place but can’t seem to navigate the forum now! Why is Rhywun placed before dwedodd when everything else comes after? Eg Dwedodd yr hen fenyw, dwedodd hi etc.
Welsh is typically a Verb-Subject-Object language (“Dwedodd rhywun wrtha i”), but it uses an emphatic structure to stress a particular part of a sentence by moving it to the front.
Here’s how it works with rhywun (someone):
Standard Order (VSO):Gwelodd rhywun ddraig. (Verb - Subject - Object) “Someone saw a dragon.”
Emphatic Structure:Rhywun welodd ddraig. (Subject - Verb - Object) “Someone saw a dragon.” (stressing who saw it).
Hi, that’s good to know. . thinking about the sentence though and to me the rest of it seems the important part, ie what they were saying. I haven’t included it though as I can’t recall exact words. I do know what you mean though and that may come in handy! Thank you!
It’s also possible that you’ve been given that to practise as a “chunk” and not a complete sentence, so it could be the beginning of a second part, e.g. Nes i gwrdd â rhywun ddwedodd bo hi wedi prynu car newydd. - “I met someone who said that she had bought a new car.” Without the first part that would be the expected word order - Ddwedodd rhywun bod hi wedi prynu car newydd.
Because remembering what ‘connecting word’ to use in subordinate and relative clauses has proved so difficult for me, I decided to trudge through each of the sentences of Exercise 15.2 on page 47 of Gareth King’s Intermediate Welsh. A Grammar and Workbook and try to explain the ‘what and why’ to myself in the hope that the rules will fasten themselves firmer into my memory. And number 16 is doing my head in! “Will you (chi) give me a book I can offer as a prize?” My original explanation to myself was: there is an implied which/that so it is a relative clause > neither of the 2 parts has mae (i.e. it is an ‘all other verbs’ situation), therefore: a + soft mutation. Nope. The answer is: “Newch chi roi llyfr i mi y galla i gynnig fel gwobr”. There are only 3 reasons I can think of for explaining why the connecting word is ‘y’ and not ‘a + soft mutation’. Here goes. First self-explanation: It is a relative clause with a ‘hidden’ which/that > the subjects in the 2 parts are different > although not actually stated halfway down page 46 of Intermediate Welsh, the ‘different subjects’ rule also applies to verb forms other than mae > thus y. Second self-explanation (and I had to delve into GK’s Modern Welsh. A Comprehensive Grammar to achieve this one): It is an indirect sentence [page 375 of MW: section “(2) In an indirect clause we can remove the that altogether and still have a perfectly good sentence”; then turn to page 387 where the section ‘Indirect Complex Sentences’ appears to correlate with ‘Subordinate Clauses’ – Units 11, 12 and 13 of Intermediate Welsh] > because it is the first and not the second part of the sentence that really is the question, I need to consider it to be an affirmative subordinate clause > the clause is ‘any other verb form’ (not a form of bod) > thus y. Third self-explanation: something I haven’t been able to find/think up. Will someone relieve my anguish and enlighten me with the correct grammatical sleuthing process? (I haven’t finished trudging, so I may be back here…)
The trick with this one is a) identify the implied ‘that’ (which you did), b) decide whether it is a relative clause ‘that’ or not and, if it’s not, c) decide on the correct form of ‘that’.
An implied ‘that’ alone does not indicate a relative clause. The second part of the sentence must relate directly to the thing in question. In this case, offering it as a prize does not relate directly to the book, it relates to what you are going to do with it.
So once we can rule out a relative clause, we can rule out a as the ‘that’.
We have now covered steps a) and b) above which leaves us with c).
Having eliminated that=a, we are left with 3 choices for ‘that’, namely bod, y and mai/taw. bod = ‘that’ when the word following the ‘that’ is either the present or imperfect form of bod. In this example it’s not either of these, so we can eliminate that=bod. mai (N) and taw (S) = ‘that’ when the word following the ‘that’ is not a verb at all. In this example it’s a verb, so we can eliminate that=mai/taw. y = ‘that’ when the word following the ‘that’ is any verb that is not either the present or imperfect form of bod. In this example that’s what we have, so we need to use that=y.
I can see you’re putting a lot of thought into considering different types of sentences and clauses, which isn’t in itself a bad thing, but it does over complicate it. The only rule you really need here is the “which ‘that’ rule” I’ve described above - and to be fair, you already cracked the sneakiest bit of finding the hidden ‘that’ which is often the most difficult bit for a lot of people.
Can’t take it too seriously but it’s entertaining, and 25-ish minutes is a nice episode length if you need to spend that time concentrating hard to understand.
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