Not at the moment, I’m afraid, Karen - it’s one of the things we want to be able to do, but it’s probably going to have to wait until we can hire more tech people… 
Thanks for the quick response. I know where I am anyway 
2 Likes
How do people normally render “washing-up liquid” in Welsh?
gwlybwr golchi llestri would be one literal translation, but is there a better one?
Diolch.
personally, I’d probably use hylif golchi llestri
6 Likes
Hi 
Is there any difference in saying he didn’t…between
Wnaeth e ddim. And/or. Doedd e ddim…? 
wnaeth e ddim = he didn’t
doedd e ddim = he wasn’t
4 Likes
How would you say ‘would you mind if…’ in Welsh or would you use a different expression altogether?
Oes ots 'da ti os…?
Pretty informal, and I might be totally wrong.
1 Like
If you look up the verb “mind” here:
It gives quite a few examples of “would you mind …”, including at least one very close to @margaretnock’s version.
There is also the verb “meindio”, which to me sounds like a direct lift from English (but looking in http://geiriadur.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html it seems as though it’s been used in Welsh since at least the early 1800s).
“would you mind if I go the pub” to me maps to “are you OK if I go to the pub”, or “is it OK for me to go to the pub”, which might be simpler in Welsh, but I’m not going to risk posting what I think their Welsh translations actually are in case I get it wrong.
I’d say ‘fyddai ots gen ti taswn i’n…’ or something like that
4 Likes
So would I.
2 Likes
and that literally means what? ‘it will be mattering to you if I were to…’? I don’t quite get it
The soft mutation on the “byddai” makes it a question, not a statement; and "it will be " would just be “bydd” – this here, with the “-ai” ending, is more of a conditional. So more like “Would it matter to you if I were to…?”
Also: I just checked to see what the dictionaries said about ots, and it is apparently a borrowing (several hundred years ago) from English “odds” – as in, “it makes no odds” = “it doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t matter”
4 Likes
Brilliant thanks
1 Like
I thought that it was 1st person future ‘I will be’?
“No one likes the horrible cat”
Does neb yn hoffi’r gath ofnadwy
or
Does neb sy’n hoffi’r gath ofnadwy?
One of the things I do to practice is that sometimes after I’ve said a fairly simple sentence in English I think “Can I say that in Welsh?” and have a go. “No one likes the horrible cat” is what I said after feeding aforementioned Cath Ofnadwy yesterday.
I think it’s bydda i for ‘I will be’ but byddai fo/fe for ‘he would be’
3 Likes
What @johnwilliams_6 said
I can’t give you the whole set of endings off the top of my head, precisely because that’s the kind of rote-learning that SSi avoids; and if you look them up in anything but Gareth King’s grammar (and possibly even there, to some small degree) you’ll find there are small differences between the written forms and how we’ve actually heard it pronounced. So, to the best of my ability:
Future: byddaf i, byddi di, bydd o/e/hi – but most written final -f are silent for most speakers unless they’ve got their best Chapel voice on, so SSi teaches you to say eithaf and difrif etc. without the -f (eitha’ da, o ddifri’). Byddaf is no exception, so bydda’ i sounds exactly like you’d expect byddai to sound. (I think f’s in monosyllables are usually still pronounced, like haf, and some others – but I’m not sure if, for example, I’m saying mis Hydref right, or if I should drop my f’s more )
Conditional (and imperfect in literary): byddwn i, byddet ti, byddai fo/fe/hi – which is the one we’ve got here, but the final -ai isn’t pronounced as spelt – it’s more of just an ‘uh’ sound, like the word y or the y in the first syllable – buh-dhuh, rather than buh-dhai.
I think that should be about right…
3 Likes
The first one.
The second one is the start of a statement so …
“Does neb sy’n hoffi’r gath ofnadwy yn hapus efo hi.” for example. “No-one that likes the awful cat is happy with it.” So the “sy’n” is a “who/that” kind of thing and switches it to mean they do like the awful cat (but they’re not happy with it).
3 Likes