As those are mainly Latin based languages it doesn’t necessarily follow that Welsh follows the same approach - which I discovered when I tried it and Eirwen looked at me as if I was from Mars.
So after several misfires I seem to be zoning in on the following ways of saying it in Welsh:
Gallwn i wedi dysgu Cymraeg
and
Dylwn i wedi dysgu Cymraeg
I was just getting comfortable with this when I tried a Welsh Grammar translator which came up with
Gallwn fod wedi dysgu Cymraeg
and
Dylwn fod wedi dysgu Cymraeg
So now I appear to be a Venusian instead of a Martian but Cymraeg I’m not sure???
You do know that “dylwn i” is not followed by “yn + verb noun” but only the verb noun, right? So you can’t just add the “wedi” to replace the “yn” that’s not there. Instead you add “bod” (which of course mutates) and it can be followed by “wedi”.
Of course, there’s a tendency to drop that “fod” in spoken language.
It’s because wedi doesn’t so much mean “have” as “after”, while bod is the verb “to be”. For example, when you say Dw i wedi, you’re saying “I am after” - and it’s also why if you talk to people from certain parts of Wales and Ireland (Irish uses the same pattern) you’ll sometimes hear “I’m after eating” rather than “I have eaten”. Gallwn fod wedi dysgu Cymraeg translates closest to “I could be after learning Welsh”.
I noticed that with and without the “fod”, they both translated OK from Cymraeg to English in Google Translate, so that “fod” is probably dropped a lot in informal writing on’tinternet as well.
Diolch @aran! It is nice to have confirmation sometimes of this kind of thing. (Anyway, you - plus my inate laziness - are responsible for the ongoing experiment of not still having got past chapter 1 of Gareth King!)
It’s because dylwn i and gallwn i are modals, and as such require a following VN - so a sort of ‘dummy’ VN (bod) is used to tag the wedi onto.
So yes indeed: Dylwn i fod wedi dysgu Cymraeg Gallwn i fod wedi dysgu Cymraeg
You often do hear it with the fod dropped, but strictly speaking this is the influence of English, which is happy to have modals followed by ‘have’. I wouldn’t go to war over it, though personally I think the pattern with fod sounds much more Welsh.
Justin, as far as I am concerned, your way with the Gallet ti… and Dylet ti… sentences there is fine. Shian is right as well, of course, except she spells the -et ti ending phonetically as -e ti, because that’s what it sounds like (no doubled consonants phonetically speaking in Welsh!). She uses affirmative particle Fe, which is just fine, but optional. For that matter, you could have used Fe or indeed Mi yourself - Mi ddylet ti fod wedi prynu… etc.
The only improvement I would make would be in your first sentence there, where (to me at least) it sounds better to follow Pam with a ‘that’-clause - so I would sooner hear, for ‘Why haven’t you…?’ either of the following: Pam fod ti ddim wedi…? Pam nad wyt ti wedi…?
And there is also Pam fod ti heb…? which means the same thing, cos heb = ddim wedi
Good point. I’m going to have to do some investigative work to find out what other people say!
I’m actually just trusting my ear here more than anything. Ei phrynu hi jars a bit when referring to buying a present, but people’s usage of Welsh changes from place to place, so this might be a dialect thing. I’ll ask around. I do have a half-baked theory of why I wouldn’t use ‘ei phrynu hi’, but I’ll reserve this for now until I find out what other people say.
