I am very slowly reworking my website for Welsh learners, Clwb Malu Cachu, and moving the cheat sheets from the 22-year old (!!!) HTML website. I’m also improving and correcting them as I do it.
Which leads me to the present tense of bod, which has so many different regional variations that aren’t all fully explained in any of the grammar books that I have, that I’d like a sense check. Have I got the variations right? Have I got the northern and southern variations labelled correctly?
And, in the final table, is there a version of Alt 3 for chi? I can’t find ‘tydych chi ddim’ as a variation in any of my books or online, but it would follow the pattern of the rest of them.
Searching just for the single word, in quotes, I got a few hits for both tydych and tydach. No guarantee without further digging whether they’re from first language speakers (although that’s moderately likely, if they’re not forms that get taught) or what sort of register they belong to.
I used DuckDuckGo - Google was getting worse even before it started it’s AI nonsense of telling you how much glue to put on pizza, but it used to still be good at finding specific words in quotes.
There’s also something called Startpage that gives you Google’s results without all the tracking and, I think, without the AI hallucinations, but you still need quotes around any unusual spellings or it will creatively assume that you can’t type.
I use Google with the “&udm=14” suffix, which removes all the AI stuff, the summaries, “people always ask” section, the ads, etc. I never got on with DuckDuckGo, probably because I’ve been using Google since it started and old habits die hard. I’ve been on the internet for 30 years now, which seems like way too long.
DDG used to be more private, but really not quite as good as Google - but since then it’s got slowly better & better, while Google has got rapidly worse. I didn’t know about the &udm=14 switch, though! (Copy-typing it into my reply in the vague hope that it helps me remember it.)
But yes, I remember the browser wars, and slowly and reluctantly recognising that old Google was actually better than AltaVista…
Did you know that you can use the Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes to search for this sort of thing? (It’s well worth a play around with, if you haven’t visited it before.) Better than a search engine, IMO, as it includes a whole load of oral data as well as written (in all sorts of different registers).
Out of the millions of entries, there were 3 returns for “tydych” and 8 for “tydach” (which would reinforce my own uniformed assumption that they “ty-” negatives are more common in the north…)
So rare, but not unheard of? And I think ar lafar rather than in written Welsh.
I knew the ‘ty-’ negatives were pretty rare, but they do seem to be a lot rarer than I thought!
What’s been frustrating me is that all the grammar books I have list the forms of Bod that the author prefers, with not much discussion of other options. (I will note that Gareth King is the best at listing other options!)
Heini Gruffudd, for example, completely eschews what I consider to be normal Welsh in favour of the colloquial Southern options, fi’n dod, ti’n dod, chi’n dod etc.
I understand the difference between spoken and written Welsh, but I personally don’t think it helps learners to focus only on one form of spoken Welsh, and not teach them the various other things that people might say to them. This is also why I get a bit narked at the division between Northern and Southern Welsh. The differences are relatively minor and tbh, you really have to have some familiarity with everything if you’re going to hold actual conversations with real people from across Wales, which is how the world works these days.
If you know where to start looking (and I’m not sure that I do off the top of my head), there’s loads of information on the variances, but they’ll be dialectology books rather than grammar books. (I did a tafodieitheg module as part of my MA, and it was totally fascinating).
Plus, as it’s a living language, they’ll be constantly changing, which doesn’t help either…
I’m sure there’s a lot of expertise out there, but that might be overkill for a basic cheat sheet page!
I really just want to make sure I’ve got the various bits of Bod in the present tense categorised and spelt properly!! I think I do, but because I’ve pulled together info from various sources, I’m just after a sense check.
Masculine pronoun e is sometimes fe. The pattern I’ve observed so far is that it usually happens after vowels, but less often after i/u/y or (standard pronunciation) diphthongs ae/au/ai.
That said, in a southern accent mae can sound more like ma’, which is probably why I’ve heard ma’ fe.
Yeah, that’s consistent across dialects - o/fo if you’re dabbling in Gog. In true SSiW fashion, I’m reasonably confident that I get it right most of the time, but I’m not actually aware of what the rules are that govern it… But there are rules, and they’ll be in the grammars
Fe and fo are used in the cheat sheets where they are relevant, eg smo fe, but I’ll mention them at the top of the page as well. There’s a balance to be struck between providing useful info and overwhelming people!
Thanks, Victoria. To be honest, it’s been so long since I’ve looked at the whole site, I’ve forgotten what’s there! But I am slowly migrating it to the new site, so that it’ll all become searchable and hopefully more complete. (And, also, I’ll fix the errors, because I know there are some!)
