Here’s a copy of that sentence (I’d forgotten about the treiglad) - I was wondering whether perhaps it might represent a pronunciation in Bethesda where the book is set?
This is what Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru says:
Difyr iawn.
You do see ỳ from time to time - I hadn’t particularly noticed it in a dictionary previously - @garethrking, be’ ydi’r hanes yma sỳr?!
They use the ỳ to signify an ‘uh’ sound where by position we would expect the y to have the ‘ee’ sound - generally therefore this is in single-syllable loanwords from English having U as the vowel. Often they substitute w for this of course. So beside jwg, you could have jỳg, the latter actually sounding like ‘jug’!
If this isn’t fun, I don’t know what is!
Manon reckons it was the work of a keen-eyed editor - so no, not making any particular point about Bethesda accents…
Especially when dealing with jug! Having a name beginning with ‘j’ means I am very aware of it’s dubious presence in words like ‘garej’, where, at least it would be hard to use anything else, but ‘siwg’ might do well enough for ‘jug’!
I’m OK with J in loanwords, myself. The siwg option strikes me as faintly zealous, doesn’t it you? And as for garej, well what is the alternative? - garesi is obviously no good.
It’s also used when loanwords beginning ch- (in English) get a soft mutation:
gormod o jips
too many chips
I did say garej was lacking options, unless we called it ‘ty-car’ or would that be ‘ty-gar’! But ‘chips’? Why not sglodion? Dw i’n hoffi sglodion! Yum! Oh, er, iym???
Well yes, so do I - iỳm iỳm indeed!
But if you want to sound like a NATIVE speaker, say chips/ jips !
(sglodyn was originally a chip off a block of wood or similar - then adopted by the language planners for its more common use these days)
Your aversion to loanwords is very well known here…and I have to admit that when I first started speaking Welsh properly I hated them too and always tried to use the ‘proper’ Welsh word for everything. But English has a huge amount of loanwords and that fact never did it any harm!
I was teasing a bit over chips, but it is hard to know when words have been grabbed and kept or whether words heard on Cyw are due to the language purists pushing a ‘proper’ alternative to what everybody actually says and will carry on saying! Chips it will be for me in future!
The learners’ novel Modrybedd Afradlon has a character in it who is a retired school teacher. She is always insisting on the “perfectly good Welsh words” for things instead of loanwords. It has been a long time since I read it, but I think she relaxed a bit about it later.
Let’s hope so…
Yes - you get this ‘language police’ phenomenon mostly with minority languages, I’m afraid.
I suppose we must also mention “sosej” in this context.
I will quietly think to myself “selsigen”, but say nothing.
OK. I’m using this as an excuse to ask an obscure question that has interested me for sometime:
Is the Welsh mwg for smoke related to the English/Norse muggy for humid drizzly type weather?
Also, as I’m on a roll, do we use muggy in English in Wales and S England Westpondia, etc, and @Novem, does it or something like muggi ever get used in Scandinavian countries for mist?
Not that I know of, though I don’t speak any Scandinavian language very well so I’m not much help
[quote=“JohnYoung, post:3963, topic:3153”]
the English/Norse muggy for humid drizzly type weather?[/quote]
Huh. Over here, “muggy” only means very humid, not drizzly at all. We have a lot of it in the summer (out here in the middle of the country).
I love it! Anyone else at 17 wouldn’t speak Scandinavian languages at all @novem just doesn’t speak them very well!
Same here in southeast England.