I asked before about spelling and one answer is that welsh spelling is phonetic.
But the thing is, Id like to learn to properly spell so I can read and write as well.
Is there standard spelling.
I mean , for example, is it esiau or isio? Where can I find conventional spelling.?
Also. Im wondering about word order. Im seing that in some places it is the same as english and other places otherwise. Likewise, in the lessons Dwi comes at the beginning of the sentence but I have seen other sources that shows it at the end
The best resource for modern written Welsh is âYmarfer Ysgrifennu Cymraegâ by Gwyn Thomas. It is an authoritative resource about spelling, syntax, mutations and other grammatical things. But it is in Welsh.
Gareth King has numerous books in English that would help you as well.
The standard spelling is eisiau. The problem with many dictionaries is that in order to find the conventional spelling, you need to know it first, which doesnât help! Gareth King has also published a dictionary for Welsh learners which does give some variations.
yes, for instance dwi can appear at the end when the word order has changed for emphasis.
Standard English has quite a fixed word order, that you canât really mess around with too much - so weâll mostly do emphasis with tone of voice, and try to reflect that in writing with exclamation marks or italics or all-caps etc. So if youâre insisting that youâre going to the shop, and not to the ice rink or the police station, we might put âIâm going to the shop!â or âIâm going to the shop!â or some such.
Welsh can often emphasize things just by putting them at the start of the sentence when you might not otherwise expect them to be there, so while your neutral translation would be Dw iân mynd iâr siop, I think youâll also find (someone here will swiftly help out if Iâm wrong) that you could say Mynd iâr siop dw i or Iâr siop dw iân mynd.
Again, someone else will probably confirm or correct this, but I think Wenglish speakers (valley speech, strongly Welsh-influenced English) can and do say things like âGoing to the shops, I am,â which is something I would simply never say in English.
Wow, it is very interesting because Iâve never thought about thisâŚbut people from my home town - Brecon - close to the valleys - say this kind of thing aaaalllll the timeâŚ
âŚit seems completely normal to me - although I havenât lived there for years and wouldnât say it myself ( in Yorkshire! - might get some funny looks! ) - but at the same time it really reminds me of home - I can hear people saying that
I wasnât really aware either, but I started listening for it today, expecting it to be old fashioned or something that might have died out a bit and itâs not - itâs normal and far more common than I expected - everyone seems to be doing it.
Well it is a funny thing - I was mentioning in another post a short while ago, that I was stunned to find out ( by chance I saw some census data) that the vast majority of people spoke Welsh in Brecon at about 1900âŚand that it dropped like a stone over 30 to 40 years as a result of the Welsh Not and the associated sense of there being â no futureâ in the language, at that time.
@Iestyn mentioned in the thread that exactly the same thing was true during the same period in the valleys and mentioned that a lot of families took the decision to âswitchâ their family language overnight - incredible stuff (terrible).
I can easily imagine how families switching to their second language might bring elements of their first one with them. In this post we are talking about emphatic sentences in English arenât we?!..,there was another discussion which I canât find immediately about tags⌠itâs obvious that they are used in English especially in the valleys at the end of a sentence in the way they would have been used in WelshâŚisnât it? (did you see what I did there?!)
So, not very surprisingly at all, I suppose we have ended up with a mutated version of EnglishâŚwhich many Welsh genes in it!
He would make a good poet though - the best poets seem to have happily unmastered the art of SVO. If Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas did Yoda it might go like this.
Born great, some are,
greatness some achieve,
and greatness thrust upon them, some have. Herh herh herh.
The fool doth think, wise, is he,
but to be a fool the wise man knows himself.
Though right, wise men at their end know dark is,
had forked no lightning they because their words
Go gentle into that good night, do not. Yeesssssss.
