I have acquired Gareth King’s latest opus ‘Working Welsh’. Great stuff. I particularly like the bit in Appendix 3 where he extends infinite forgiveness towards those who make honest mistakes in their mutations but calls down fire and brimstone on those who tell them it doesn’t matter. I’m sure that is a proper attitude. I do wonder though: are some kinds of camdreigliadau more jarring to the Welsh ear than others? I ask because I have been listening to the northern challenges for the third time and have convinced myself that in a few places, but by no means all, I hear ‘yn diddorol’ rather than the correct ‘yn ddiddorol’. It strikes me that if this is the case, it would not be all that surprising, given the slightly tongue-twisting nature of the double dd, if there were a perhaps quite unconscious aversion to this particular combination. OK, we Saesneg do manage it with ‘thither’, but then one doesn’t get to say ‘thither’ very often these days.
But it could just be my brain playing tricks on me, in which I apologise to our esteemed tutors. The general question remains though: do some mistakes in mutations make the native speaker wince while others pass almost unnoticed? (Not looking for an excuse to cut corners here, just curious).
Me too! The important thing to remember is that whilst mutations do matter, they are not worth worrying hugely about when you first start out - worrying only causes interruptions to conversation and destroys confidence. The more a learner learns, speaks and listens, the more they’ll slot into place and ‘sound right’ and become second nature. But ignoring them completely won’t work - they are there for a reason (it’s just difficult to remember all the reasons to begin with!)
I can’t answer as a native speaker - only as a second-language speaker, but I would say yes, this is almost certainly the case. However, I would say from experience that which mistakes cause a wince will almost certainly differ from person to person, and which ones pass unnoticed will also vary from region to region/ dialect to dialect.
For me, the difference between d and dd is very hard to hear and it’s hard to imagine that someone can hear it easily. It’s also a sound that is hard to pronounce for me (doesn’t exist in my native language). And while the sounds are distinct, it’s just a slight difference of the position of the tongue - more at the back/top (d) or forward (dd) - but in the reality, the tongue can be anywhere between and all the possible sounds in between are gradient from d to dd. I have problems with pronouncing d and dd close to each other and quite often, I go with something in between these sounds, as a lazy pronunciation. I would say every language has its own lazy pronunciation situations where even native speakers don’t bother pronouncing correctly (when speaking quickly etc.). But I can’t say if it is the case here or not.
That’s interesting, Ani. For me as an English speaker the difference between the d and dd sounds, as far as English words go, is perfectly clear: I would never, for example, have any problem in hearing the difference between the words ‘dough’ and ‘though’. But I appreciate that if the sound doesn’t exist in one’s own language, the brain tends to substitute an approximation that may not even be that close. For me the trickiest sound in Welsh is the ll: I think I have just about got the sound of initial ll but I can’t figure out what is going on when it occurs medially in a word like ‘dallt’. To me that comes across as sounding more or less like ‘dasht’, but I strongly suspect that is not at all how it sounds to a Welsh speaker.
