I wonder if someone could kindly explain to me the Welsh word ‘ame’, about which the dictionaries seem rather unhelpful. I first came across this in ‘Martha, Jac a Sianco’: ‘Roedd Martha’n hanner ame bod y tri oen swci a gollon nhw y llynedd…’. Right, I thought, my guess is that this is a dialect form of ‘amau’, to doubt or suspect, so ‘Martha half suspected that the three pet lambs which they lost last year…’. Fair enough, though I do sometimes wish that the Welsh could agree a bit more on how to spell their language, but just to be sure I then checked in GPC – nothing there – and then in the Glosbe dictionary. This does not actually give a definition for ‘ame’, but does give a lot of usage examples, where it seems to be associated particularly with the word ‘angen’: ‘ac ame angen inni osod targedau uchelgeisiol’ which it translates as ‘and we need to set ambitious targets’, and also ‘i ran o’r gymdeithas lle ame ei angen fwyaf’ which it translates as ‘to a part of society that needs it most’. This must be a quite different ‘ame’ from my presumed ‘amau’ in the ‘Martha, Jac a Sianco’ case, but I can’t figure out what exactly it is – from the syntax it looks as if it ought to be part of the verb ‘bod’, but it’s certainly not one I’ve ever come across. Any enlightenment gratefully received.
It looks most likely to be a typo of “mae” to me in the case of the last two examples.
I’m sure you’re right about it being a dialect spelling of “amau” in the first example.
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Of course, thank you. There are quite a few other similar usage example for ‘ame’ in the Glosbe online dictionary, so it looks as if what it does is hoover up chunks of text, misprints and all, and reproduce them without verification. I shall be less trusting in future.