Ooh – my bad. Thanks for explaining – it’s not a very British term, which is (a) why I thought I should explain and (b) why I didn’t actually know what I was talking about!
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Well, I think it’s only a mystery because (a) we expect names to mean something, like Cymry being something like ‘companions’ or ‘comrades’; (b) we like to think that understanding it might tell us something about English-Welsh relations in ancient times, if not more recently; so © we’re interested in it. I think there are actually loads of linguistic phenomena that are unexplained, that only rate ‘puzzling’ rather than ‘mystery’ because they’re just not that interesting – unless you’re particularly geeky, or think you can string them out into especially nerdy clickbait 
One example might be those words (I can’t think of any off the top of my head, unfortunately) that can be securely reconstructed for, say, common Celtic or Proto-Germanic, but not for any other Indo-European languages: we’re often tempted to suppose that they come from whatever pre-Indo-European peoples the Celts or whoever must have met/conquered/married on their travels, but we generally have no way of knowing. Or another one would be so-called s-mobile, where you get words that have an s- on the front in some languages and not in others with no apparent pattern or reason: a couple of examples are Welsh tarw, Greek tauros, English ‘steer’; or Welsh to, Greek stegos, English ‘thatch’. (I always like to think of a Stegosaurus as a thatched lizard.)
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Heh, don’t worry about it! I do it all the time, and you were still in the ballpark with the definition 
And besides, “lemon” might mean something totally different somewhere else.
Actually, now that I think of it, “lemon” means all the sexy bits in a fan fiction story, too 
So if you read that sort of thing and it says “Lemons Ahead,” be warned!
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You know your stuff, by the sounds of it.
I have gone off on jaunts over the years with words and I probably will continue to do so, but they usually end up with really mundane and simple explanations and the experts tend to know what their talking about i.e. as you suggest - Lloegr maybe is just that and no further explanation required.
Maybe it was written into Armes Prydain one day, or whatever preceded it, for no particular reason and it just stuck.
The only niggle is that Celtic place names and the like, do tend to be descriptive more often than not.
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Are there many things to watch with welsh subtitles? Just watched a short clip on Cymru Fyw by Noel James on depression and it had subtitles in Welsh and I wondered if there were many more things like that out there?
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As far as S4C goes, there are quite a few programmes that have Welsh subtitles, although not all. The subtitling is done by an independent company for S4C - i.e. not by the programme producers or by S4C themselves, so I don’t know that there’s a definitive list available. Worth trying the S4C clic (watch again) website to see what’s there.
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Great - i never realised that. Will start browsing, thanks.
How would you say “all at once” in Welsh ? As in the sentence “it all went wrong at once”
My first though in general was ‘ar unwaith’ - but in the example you give, ‘yn syth’ sounds a bit better to be…
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Ah I didn’t think of “yn syth” . That does sound better , diolch
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Hi there,
I just learned “fydden ni ddim yn moyn” - we wouldn’t want.
Could I swap out “ni” - we, for something like:
“fydden i ddim yn moyn” - I wouldn’t want?
Or:
“fydden fy mam i ddim yn moyn” - my mother wouldn’t want?
Diolch!
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In principle you can use the same construction as you said, but note that you’d have to conjugate the verb in order to be correct. It doesn’t matter much for the “I” and “we” forms, as they sound pretty much the same, but for 3rd person “byddai” is the correct form which then gets mutated for the negative construction.
Fyddai fy mam i ddim yn moyn …
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Ah yes, conjugation of the verb…I haven’t really looked into that much yet, and should probably buy a book or something. I have worked out a bit from the SSiW lessons so far (mainly through the conjugations of “to say”) but it would be good to formalise and learn more verbs. Thank you!
Thanks[quote=“aran, post:3728, topic:3153”]
Sounds as though you’re pushing yourself in all the right ways with Level 2! 
[/quote]
Just following up about a month later, i can’t remember where i read it but i saw your advice somewhere else to try going forward five lessons even if you don’t feel comfortable and then repeating all five afterwards. I didn’t think that it would actually work and i didn’t feel like i had the material down at the end of challenge five, but i’ve just finished repeating the first five challenges (and tonight just finished challenge seven) and you were right! The second time through it was much easier and i didn’t struggle with anything, and now in challenges six and seven i feel like i’m up to par and won’t need to repeat these.
I’ve also been pushing forward with the Glossika Welsh course at a rate of about ten sentences a day and overall am feeling very optimistic about the future of my Welsh 
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Superb - congratulations, because that’s a very important mindset shift right there 
[It also means you didn’t really need the second run through, except to prove to yourself that it was working… ;-)]
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Depending on where exactly you are in your SSiW journey, I wouldn’t worry to much about “conjugating” verbs in the early stages. Just follow the SSiW course (if doing the old version), or level (if doing the new) to the end, and hopefully, the patterns will become clear, and almost 2nd-nature.
You can then (if you are grammatically inclined) look at a grammar book and see how it all fits in, but in SSiW-land, we don’t start with a grammar book (I believe some of us never even go near one…). I quite like a bit of grammar myself, from time to time, but it’s a personal thing, and not something to get worried about.
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Yes, I am finding it fine without grammar books so far. Admittedly. I’m not writing anything myself. I’m finding that the audio levels and actual speaking practices along with the forums, Radio Cymru and social media are doing it for me. As you will have noticed, I’m not above asking basic questions relating to something that I have missed from about a year ago or perhaps about the outworking of live dialect. So all in all, I think that my grammar is bedding in subconsciously, or at least that is my plan.
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How would I say , “my daughter has chickenpox”?
When I went in to the chemist to get some medicine for her yesterday I said to the woman ,“mae gan merch fi chickenpox” but afterwards I realised that I had probably said it wrong as if I was to say ,“I have a cold” then I would say ,“mae annwyd arna i” and not “mae gen i annwyd”
You can generally use either construction - “mae annwyd arna i” and “mae gen i annwyd” are both fine.
Chickenpox is “brech yr ieir”.
Hope she feels better soon.
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Diolch @siaronjames , she has got over her fever now but is still covered in spots.
I will try and memorise “brech yr ieir” and use that next time
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