Would ‘gwasanaeth mewn car’ be too long?
i think hawddu pawddu has been mentioned a few times - slort of works with coffi
I was getting double entendres with that one. Another one that just came to mind was cadw mi glou, a play on cadw mi gei
Mae’n ddrwg gen i! Blame my age! I like tra’n car!
Back to my obsession with road signs -
The ones in West Wales seem more chilled and poetic than those around the Metropolis. Here’s an example:
"Pan fo’r golau coch yn dangos … very Ryan & Ronnie
I assume it’s short for Pan fyddo yr golau coch yn dangos … (when the red light shows…).
Anyway my tiny question is: why the “o” in fyddo and the “y” in yr please?
Edited:
Aaaargh, I meant the “r” in yr followed by a consonant.
Or maybe fyddo’r golau?
I’m going to be controversial with this and say that the translation isn’t what struck me as wrong, I think it’s ok and as Aran said it’s something that will become the accepted norm soon enough. I’d like to know why the Welsh doesn’t come first on the sign?
I was assuming that the apostrophe was showing the missing y (?)
eg fyddo’r = foddo yr (?) I’m probably wrong
Ah, sorry. I didn’t explain very well. I assumed that it was correct, but was just trying to learn why. I wondered if “fyddo yr” was a different construction/tense/aspect from plain “fydd y”. Perhaps conditional or something?
Strangely, I think it was Cymraeg first, then English. It seems to go that way once you get past Carmarthen. Or perhaps I just ignore the English now.
Incidentally, has anyone noticed this with the motorway matrix signs? Monolingual Welsh, then the message comes up in English further down the motorway.
Gareth King gives pan fo angen as when needed, with the fo being the subjunctive (and mutated form) of bod. Another example - Lle bo angen - where need be,
The 'r is the definite article following a vowel not preceding a consonant.
I think…
I was wondering about this today as we were asked to put our job titles in Cymraeg on our e-mail signatures.So often i am coming across words asnd especially road sign phrases that make sense as a learner but do not seem to have evolved naturally, like the words seem a little bit forced into Welsh.
So the word i was given: Cynorthwy-ydd for assistant seemed strange to me, especially the hyphen, though this was professional translated.
I made sense of it though, Cymorth I know as to support, so they m changes to an n in this form, fine, then the ending is strange. -wyr seems to mean in my understandings something like ‘person doing a thing’, like in dysgwyr (learner), so if it’s cynorthwyr ‘supporter’ that would make perfect sense to me. However an assistant is not simply a supporter, but part of all the things that do the support, so perhaps needs something else to suggest activity and I know some job roles often end with -ydd, like ysgrifennydd ‘secretary’.
So do hyphens have a similar function in Cymraeg? it could be cynorthwyydd, but having the letter y twice seems odd, so the hyphen?
I think @cat-1 has explained yr to 'r perfectly. Fyddo y sounds awful. Fyddo’r rolls gently off the tongue!
Indeed. If fact so easily that I started singing the words on the sign to this tune
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=pan+for+nos+alys+williams&view=detail&mid=40A155BA4E4CD6F62EF840A155BA4E4CD6F62EF8&FORM=VIRE
Yeah, that, really - often (for my money) a sign of something that’s a bit translatey rather than naturally grown…
I guess words that are “a bit translatey” can become normal usage very quickly - “cynorthwyydd dysgu” is just as ubiquitous (and possibly odd) as “teaching assistant”, these days…
(Maybe the hyphen is a bit translatey-pedantic.)
I thought so, though ‘Tim Prynu Adwerth’ is growing on me.
Ah, I was getting mixed up with an English rule.
Anyway, as if by magic. I arrived home this evening to some roadworks outside my house, with this sign writing variation.
Pan fo’r golau 'n goch…
I think it means: When the light is red… but the English was still:
When the red light shows.
Is there no end to the freehandedness of these translations?