And Zöe is normally written with one. I went through 7 years of conventional grammar school and never learned this. (and failed to learn many other things, quite often my own fault, admittedly).
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The Welsh name for this is a didolnod. It is used when two vowels occur next to each other but need to be pronounced separately, so sgïo is sgee-o but sgio could be sgyo. Even though we tend to pronounce the io sound on the end of words as ee-o anyway.
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My kids say efo not gyda, in Barry. I have the feeling it’s seen as slightly more ‘proper’ speak.
It would be interesting to ask one of the teachers about their policy on things like that if the chance ever arises. (Unlikely, not liking to bother them unnecessarily…)
Oh, that’s a rather lovely thought…
Up here it’s definitely the other way round!
That’s really interesting! I will have to check with the kids later, but that’s the impression I think they have. In sure they’ve even corrected me sometimes when I’ve said gyda!
Snap! I learned ‘Chloe’ was pronounced ‘Clow-ee’ like Zoe was Zow-ee but that was by reading about or meeting a Chloe, I forget which! And I still called the mark an umlaut and presumed it was German, thinking such names must have come to UK with assorted Germans such as George 1, wives of others, Queen Victoria’s mother and Prince Albert!
That was what threw me over sgïo. I just presumed the ï was a mistake!
Quick one. What word would people use for nagging as in ‘stop nagging me’ I have a 3 and a 4 year and it seems to be something I want to say a lot. Diolch pawb
swnian would be the first one that comes to mind, so you could say “Paid â swnian” or “Stopia swnian” (or peidiwch/stopiwch if you’re speaking to both of them at the same time!
)
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[quote=“henddraig, post:3752, topic:3153”]
And I still called the mark an umlaut and presumed it was German[/quote]
Well, “those two dots” fulfill different functions in different languages. In German, they cause the vowels a, o and u to become their respective umlauts ä, ö, ü. (As far as I know ö and ü are used in Turkish as well) The “umlauted” versions ï and ë only exist in loan words, and only in the other function, to seperate vowels that otherwise would be pronounced as a diphthong.
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Yes, Dutch uses them as well. Twentytwo for example is “tweeentwintig” but it needs the umlaut on the third e to differ it from the previous word “twee”. Only in dutch it is called a “Trema”
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Plattdüütsch, which is a dialect of german which sounds quite similar to english, is littered with umlauts. As you can tell from that one word
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Diaereses are fun. I’ve seen them used in rather old-fashioned modern English on words like ‘coöperation’, and they make sure the car manufacturer Citroën doesn’t sell you a lemon.
(NB: for certain English speakers a ‘lemon’ is a wreck of a car. There’s an important economics article from decades ago called The Market in Lemons, and it’s actually not about citrus fruit.)
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OK just for the record, Steffi says that gyda and efo are completely interchangeable, and it generally depends if you’ve currently got a teacher from the North or the South! Although apparently one southern teacher gets very upset when people say efo… (On the other hand, I recently heard the teacher from Ynys Môn saying “Sa i’n mynd i wneud…” so it’s a bit of a melting pot, our school!)
However on the subject of posessives, she’s very clear that the ‘correct’ form is “Mae gen i bla”, and not “Mae bla gyda fi”, which she may doesn’t see as acceptable language at all!
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Does anyone know how to say in Welsh “I know the word, but I’m not sure what it means,” and/or “there were a lot of words I didn’t know”?
Specifically, I’m wondering about gwybod or nabod. I know in principle that nabod is people and gwybod is facts; and I know that most European languages other than English make a similar distinction; but that doesn’t mean that they carve up the so-to-speak market share of connaître and savoir in the exact same way as each other.
I had a conversation with my partner about this the other day, with me arguing that Je connais le mot, mais je sais pas ce qu’il veut dire sounded fine to me, and her checking her intuitions about conhosco and sei against whatever DuckDuckGo could suggest, but what I actually want to know is what to say in Welsh…
My understanding is that Welsh is pretty well split along (ad)nabod for people and gwybod for, um, knowledge.
I’d guess your sentence would be “dwi’n gwybod y gair, ond dwi i ddim yn siŵr beth mae’n ei ystyr” (?)
But now I want to know why we have only ‘know’ in English…
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I guess these things boil down to very different etymologies for the words and the French probably have different etymologies to the Welsh. We are trying to overlap meanings of words with different origins.
The Welsh ones have the “bod” - gwybod from gwydd and bod and I have no idea on nabod. Connaitre in French comes from Latin and may overlap with cognaissant in English, but then again, that may have come to English from French anyway. The English “know” to me implies something that exists in your head or your consciousness, whereas the Welsh ones are perhaps derived from describing the things and our relationship to them - just a thought.
I think all of these words are not really the same thing, but a good match-up and perhaps we just create rules, for when there’s a mismatch?
Strangely, Scots and Scottish border counties of England still have knar or similar for know something, and ken for to know (ken) someone someplace. I’m not sure about Ireland, Oz, NZ, US, Canada etc.
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They are interchangeable and used frequently in my neck of the woods. e.g. Ah ken / knaw him fine - I know him well. Then we also use Ah knaw … Ah divn’t knaw - I know … I don’t know. Also: Ah ken … Ah dinnae ken - I know … I don’t know.
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Oh dear, so de Cymru is a whole different country!!! Having had at least some lessons on Gower from a lovely gog lady and spent a number of holidays in Gwynedd with my ‘auntie’ when she moved there, I say ‘mae’n ddrwg ge i’ and ‘mae ci gyda fi’ so am totally beyond the pale!!