Pronouncing years

s’mae - how do I pronounce 2021 (as in the year) please - I know how to say the rest of the sentence I’m doing but not how to pronounce a year! Diolch! :grinning:

I’d say “dwy fil un ar hugain”.

Dwy, because years are feminine, fil because mil (thousand) mutates after dau or dwy. un ar hugain (one and twenty) because years (some years) count old fashionedly.

And if I was to say something happened in 2021 it would be

yn nwy fil un ar hugain.

Other ways of saying it are (probably) available.

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diolch -so we don’t say twenty twenty-one in Welsh- we have to say two thousand and twenty one?

It’s how I’d say it. But with Welsh being different from village to village, it might be that elsewhere. Probably need to find a native speaker, or ask our resident experts, @siaronjames, @Hendrik, @garethrking.

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There are different accepted forms to say the years, but I haven’t heard anyone refer to 2021 as “ugain un ar ugain” or “dau ddeg dau ddeg un”. I’d say “dwy fil dau ddeg un”, but @margaretnock 's way is just as valid. Occasionally you can also hear the year “spelled out” as “dau dim dau un”.

As an aside, I feel deeply honoured and humbled at the same time to be named among the resident experts on here. I think there is a bunch of more knowledgeable people on here, and a lot of the knowledge that I share came from this forum in the first place :blush:

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What Hendrik said!

I’d use either dwy fil un ar ugain or dwy fil dau ddeg un - both ar fine.
If you think how you’d say a year from last century, you’d always start with mil (mil naw chwedeg saith, mil naw wythdeg, mil naw nawdeg naw etc), so this century will always start with dwy fil (and then you have a choice of ‘new’ numbers or ‘old’ numbers), although as Hendrik said, occasionally you will hear individual numbers dau dim dau un, though I’d say that is far less common.

As my aside, I can’t say how chuffed I am to have Hendrik join the ‘resident expert’ team (I think I’m probably right in saying that, as both of us are 2nd language speakers, we feel a little bit of ‘impostor syndrome’ on occasion being described as ‘experts’, but we just like helping out when we can! :wink: )
I’ve been a bit under the weather lately and haven’t been checking in so often, so I’m delighted that he’s around to help!

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@Hendrik, @siaronjames. The difference between you and me is that I’ve learned enough to get by, but not enough to remember why things work the way they do. You two know the rules, and can explain them. @garethrking does it for a living. I tend to stay out of the technical questions unless I’m very confident, and even then I sometimes get it wrong.

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un ar hugain, by the way - with an h-. :slight_smile:

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Oops! Diolch Gareth - I’m blaming the chest infection :wink:

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Quite alright Siaron - I often use this excuse myself. :+1:

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diolch to you all- I’ll make a note of how to say it and keep practising! :smiling_face:

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So, would 2005 be

dwy fil bump?

yes :slight_smile: (dwy fil a phump would also be ok)

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Every time I see the title of this thread on the forum, I want there to be a companion one called “pronouncing eyes”.

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Head and shoulders, knees and toes…?

I was just thinking (facetiously) of the South Walian pronunciation of English - where ‘hearing’ and ‘earring’ fall together as jöring (more or less, in German orthography).

As a South Walian fluent in Wenglish, I can affirm that I pronounce ear, year and here identically unless I stop to think about it. :crazy_face: :rofl:

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Yes indeed. My dad always said “year” and not “ear” even when he lost much of his accent after many years in England.

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Same here. I wasn’t even five when we moved from Wales to London, I’ve only recently started to teach myself Welsh here in the Midlands and, in between, I spent the majority of my working life in Germany. Yet I’ve always pronounced ear/year/here identically without even thinking about it. I suppose I ‘blame’ my late parents. :joy: Proud to come from the Rhondda. I also spot it as a ‘give away’ when hearing someone speaking English who otherwise gives no other verbal indications of their Welsh origins.

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