Is it ever acceptable to drop the 'yn' in adverbs?

Welsh General / Questions
#21

Fascinating. There seems to be far more flexibility with abbreviations in Welsh than in English.

#22

Indeed. Flexibility seems to be a byword in Welsh. Which got me thinking that I hadn’t a clue what was the Cymraeg for “flexible”.

After looking at several online dictionaries, it seems “hyblyg” and “ystwyth” both have this meaning.

I wondered if “ystwyth” had anything to do with the “yswyth” in Aberystwyth. Well, “Aber” of course means mouth of a river or estuary, and the river is the Ystwyth in this case, but was the river originally named because it was “flexible” e.g. meandering? Pwy a ŵyr - who knows.

#23

Yes.

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#24

Oh, but you’ve hit on an interesting point. No one has idly wondered why you use “yn” to link “dw i” to “meddwl” - or why in general you always use “yn” to link an instance of “bod” with a following verb - but you don’t with other verbs that we’ve learned. Here’s the fun part - I suspect that it’s to do with this idea of bod / “to be” being “intransitive” - i.e. it doesn’t take a direct object (sorry, getting all grammarly for a second) - therefore the thing to the right of bod, if the analogy with English works, must be an adverb. In english, we use gerunds (-ing forms of verbs, “I am thinking”, etc) which can act as adverbs. In Welsh, we don’t have that gerund thing, so instead we use “yn” to make whatever is to the right into an adverb.

In your original example “thinking of you” is really short for “I am thinking of you”, hence “thinking of you” is really an adverb phrase, so I think you were on the money talking about it as an adverb. (But I take this all as explanation - not an argument to put the “yn” in “yn meddwl amdanat ti” - I’m all in for “meddwl amdanat ti”!)

So, there’s my hair-brained theory of the day…, and why I don’t think you’ve any reason to be embarrassed :wink:

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#25

Fortunately both the Ystwyth and the Rheidol are meandering. I remember reading that Aberystwyth was named so due to a cartographer’s error since of course Aberystwyth is on the mouth of the Rheidol.

#26

Feeling better already Lewie! :smile::wink:

#27

:confused: You tricked me into reading the whole thing.

:smile: :laughing: :wink:

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#28

Recently I went to take the key out of the door and thought to myself ‘oh hang on I’d better click on “safely remove hardware” first’. Hope that makes you feel better :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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#29

:grin:🤸:joy:🤸

#30

The original settlement was to the south. Just near where the Ystwyth meets the Rheidol. That’s where the ‘aber’ is, rather than where the Rheidol meets the sea, which, admittedly, is only a few metres further on. It all really does make sense! :smile:

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#31

Thanks for the info Rob. Can’t remember where I read it (maybe Hanes Cymru but not sure). :thinking:

#32

Mmm… best case scenario that is very, very slangy - and I’d expect it to be fairly unusual, because I’ve never heard it as a spoken short-cut…

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#33

Thanks Aran. That’s another useful pointer. I just don’t have the experience to know which of the abbreviations that I see in print are considered to be slangy and which are just a less formal way of speech along the lines of ‘I’ll, we’ ll, I’ve etc etc.’ Abbreviations seem to be much more prevalent in Welsh and often where there are no equivalents in English. I guess that it just takes time to develop a sense of what is or is not (at least) too slangy.

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#34

OK: so here’s a massive digression into English grammar – but bear with me, because there is a theory that this particular bit of English grammar is actually due to early Welsh influence.

Old English didn’t really have continuous tenses (e.g. “he was thinking”), but there were a couple of forms that you do occasionally find: one used the present participle (which is effectively an adjective made from a verb-stem), and would have looked something like he wæs huntende (for ‘he was hunting’); the other used the Old English gerund (which is a noun made from a verb-stem – sound familiar, anyone? – as in ‘Swimming is good for you’), with the word on (which meant ‘on’ or ‘in’ in Old English), as in he wæs on huntunge. Of these, the second version – oedd o’n hela – was much the more common.

In Middle English, these two forms became he was huntin and he was a-hunting, respectively, before falling together as the modern form ‘he was hunting’, with the option of droppin’ the g. (Incidentally, this is why we only ever “drop our g’s” on certain words ending in ‘-ing’: even types who go huntin’ and shootin’ don’t walk alon’ a lane and see a bird with an injured win’ and think to themselves “Han’ on…” :slight_smile: )

But anyway – there we go: English grammar not wholly unlike Welsh, for once, and possibly due to Welsh influence. Also, I wasn’t entirely a-joking when I suggested that we should try sounding more piratical…

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#35

Whenever I see that kind of theory, I always wonder if one of the assumptions that it is based on (that early Welsh grammar was incredibly similar to modern colloquial Welsh grammar) is entirely realistic.

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#36

Yes, I agree – and I don’t know if we even have enough Old Welsh to be sure if it was a thing or not. But by the Middle Welsh period it was certainly common (I checked!). On the other hand I’ve seen examples to say that in modern English it was still kind of optional until after Shakespeare’s time (“My lord, what dost thou read?” rather than “…art thou reading?”).

I guess one thing that might help date it as a feature in British would be if it’s also used in Cornish and/or Breton – presumably it’s fairly old if it’s common to them all. I haven’t looked at any of the Cornish on here, but perhaps others could weigh in…

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#37

The article I’ve just read uses Breton more than Welsh to compare with English in order to ensure as far as possible that the influence hasn’t been the other way around - i.e. English -> Welsh.

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#38

…and does it reach any conclusions? :slight_smile:
This seems to imply that it’s a general Insular Celtic feature that English shares – although as you pointed out, all of them except Breton would have been interacting with English to a greater or lesser extent.

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#39

At a slight tangent: I was just reading an article by McWhorter in his book “Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity” (p. 261 ff.) where he discusses Celtic influence on English, specifically the use of “do” as an auxiliary verb. The fact that Welsh, Cornish and particularly Breton have a periphrastic do construct he sees as an argument that this construct in English is a Celtic influence, not an English borrowing into Welsh or Cornish, for instance - as you already said @RichardBuck
If an “yn” construct exists in Welsh, Cornish en also Breton, the same logic could be applied to say that the progressive aspect is a Celtic influence in English. But there is a commonly used construct in Dutch, which has no Celtic influence as far as I am aware, which is not

(that would be “hij was jagende” and is very archaic), but

“hij was aan het jagen”, which also expresses a progressive aspect. On that basis, I find it hard to accept that this particular construct is a Celtic influence.

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#40

Cornish also has such a continuous construction – you can compare e.g. yth esov (vy) ow kerdhes with yr ydwyf (fi) yn cerdded “I am walking”, or yma ev owth eva with y mae ef yn yfed “he is drinking”.

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