Lestyn, thank you from the bottom of my heart and to everyone involved in the production of the course material, that is all the encouragement I need to keep going.
I really want to learn Welsh as I think it’s a beautiful language too, and on the whole I’m finding the SSIW course fairly easy, and definitely better than the repetitive grammar lessons of normal language courses. Lessons 18, 19 and 20 were a doddle in fact, so I knew I’d soon have another brick wall to get over. The fact that you repeatedly tell us it’s not a problem if you get things wrong is a HUGE help.
As long as I’m not the only one going through this, and I know I’m not, then I know I CAN do this.
Once we’re in Wales I’m going to join a Welsh class, I’ve seen some council ones which are dead cheap and and some jobs I’ve seen even offer help with learning it too. I think the success in keeping Welsh alive is down to Wales wanting to promote and encourage it and from what I can see there’s plenty of that.
If we want to place emphasis on the idea of worsening (i.e. it’s not getting better, it’s actually worsening!), then yes, the natural Welsh style, where English would use intonation, is indeed to bring the emphasised element forward and change the sentence structure accordingly. The neutral sentence would be:
Mae’n amlwg fod y sefyllfa’n gwaethygu
and this is perfectly OK as well, it just doesn’t lay special emphasis on any part of the remark.
This is what some (rather dodgy, I’m told) grammars and dictionaries refer to as ‘focus’ !
Challenge 1 south completed - woohoo!
On lesson 5 of the old challenge 1 now and finding some helpful stuff I didn’t get in the new ch.1, maybe I should have done this first.
I’m pretty sure that with the variability of Middle Welsh spelling we got to the point where there were about 7 different words potentially spelt ‘i’ when I was doing Middle Welsh – not just ‘into’ and ‘in order to’, but also ‘his’ (ei), her (ei), the (y) and I honestly forget what else. (It might only be 6, in that I think the glossaries may have listed masculine and feminine articles separately because of the different mutations they cause.) But anyway… after cursing both the language itself and ourselves for being fool enough to choose to study it, we finally became quite grateful for all those pesky mutations, in that they began to give us a fighting chance of figuring out which bloomin’ i was which.
And then we started doing Middle Welsh poetry, which completely misses out most of those puzzling little words, and it was so much worse…
)
na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye 
