Hi I’m at Level 2 challenge 2 and I’m getting really mixed up because of the “Oes (gy)dach chi …” sentence structure. I always thought it was meant to be “Oes … dach chi?”
I mean for example, I thought it would be ‘mae plant da fi’, not ‘mae da fi plant’.
I’ve asked one fluent Welsh speaker and they agreed with me. Is this a regional thing? (I’m in Pembrokeshire)
When this has come up before I’ve just ignored and done my way but it’s getting me really mixed up now and I wanted to sort out which is going to be more useful for me to learn!
I’ve a feeling that it’s an east-west thing. I was once told off by a Carmarthen native for saying Mae 'da fi gar bach - not because it was wrong, but because ‘we don’t say that’.
That sounds like the most appropriate approach if you’re already used to doing it the other way round.
A small pedantic point: if you are referring to the “da” short for “gyda” coming before “chi”, it’s probably better to represent it in writing as 'da chi
The reason is that “dach chi” is the usual way to represent the (usually) northern spoken form of “you are” (plural or polite form), so you can see that confusion might arise.
In speech they are pretty much indistinguishable so it’s not an issue.
(In other words, the same as you have done in the “da fi” form, but pedants would add the apostrophe to represent the missing “gy”. (Of course, you can’t hear the apostrophe in speech, although Victor Borge might have had a go… ).
Both are fine, so just go with whatever comes to mind first and don’t worry about ‘learning’ the other - you’ll end up understanding both without needing to worry about it…
Not really in this case, I think. Emphasis in Welsh is all about putting things at the start of the sentence, whereas these variants don’t involve this.