I have a question about the potential confusion between the future of bod and conditional of bod which are extremely similar - I have just gone back to try (again, again ) to remind myself which way round the plural endings are.
So, in the real world…it seems just about possible to get a cigarette paper between bydden ni (we would be) and byddwn ni (we will be) - I can imagine that emphasis on the ending can be picked out to a skilled ear (which I am working on)…but what about byddwn i (I would be) vs byddwn ni (we will be) in speech? (Oooo )
At the very least there would seem to be the basis for some brilliant sketches for the Welsh Two Ronnies here.
Does context mean that in the real world it’s ‘just not a problem’…or do people choose a different form to say things if it might be a problem - I guess there would be several other ways including the Baswn variant, verb stem plus ending, wna etc.
It seems that both tenses would be quite likely to be involved in the same conversation. Baswn seems like a good option but isn’t used in either SSIW course - n or s - which makes me think it isn’t used to solve this problem.
I’ll stop babbling - is this a non-problem? (If so, how so )
Yes, but my problem is whenever I hear those words I can’t help thinking of latin!
(although I do remember hearing them for other languages like “Saxon genitive” in first English lessons, and German - that I find really tough and never quite managed to learn).
OT: my first time “in the wild” with English on a school exchange type of thing I ended up in a family in Cullercoats, by the way.
I do love that expression - “Saxon genitive”, although it’s probably more misleading than helpful. I suspect most English people go from cradle to grave without ever realising that they are sometimes using “Saxon genitives”, and if it had ever been pointed out to them, might have felt a little unsettled. I think all it really boils down to is that English grammar still has a few things left over from its Germanic origins.
On the subject of Latin, I know you were joking when you brought it up earlier, but there is of course a lot of influence from Latin when it comes to the vocabulary. Some will have come via Norman French, but I suspect that that which came directly from Latin probably came more from Catholic monks than Roman soldiers.
As for the grammar, I think I have read (probably in one of Gareth’s books ) that when they came to try to formalise / regularise written Welsh, there was a tendency to be influenced by Latin (whether it was appropriate or not). It is probably much less evident in the modern language, but may not be entirely absent.
Context will distinguish these usually, I would say.
The baswn set is indeed an excellent option, if only because it’s so distinctive. Now I realise that this isn’t much help for people learning S - although I certainly heard byswn, byse etc where we were in Mid Wales - but I’m surprised to hear it’s not used in the N version of SSiW. Perhaps there’s a reason for that.
For die-hard southerners: ambiguity is a marginal feature of all languages, and rare instances such as this byddwn i vs byddwn ni must just be allowed to pass, I think.
I wondered why “byddwn” was used instead of “baswn” for the Northern course because I learned the “faswn i…taswn i” pattern in all the other courses I’ve done and so I fall over it every time in the SSiW challenges that use “byddwn” and “byddai”. I like “faswn i…taswn i”.
Baswn… taswn… is the pattern they teach on DuoLingo. I haven’t got that far on SSIW yet, so it’s going to be yet another thing where I mix north and south and end up sounding like a mongrel!
It is curious as to how things get to be so similar…
…when their meanings are not dissimilar but need to be distinguished between…,you would think people would have just used an alternative (which would have become the mainstay) to avoid the problem…
Yes, I think context will overrule. After all we have learnt plenty of other words (in Welsh and also English) that have varying and even contradictory meanings. I’m thinking of all the examples of na/'na, as well as byd, erioed, etc. The latest I’ve just found is Fawr, which apparently used to mean hardly as well as greatly.
Another is hynny, which on the southern course is always pronounced clearly like Honey, but this one gets contracted and the h dropped and some of the pronunciations make it hard sometimes to distinquish from other things, except through context.
Ha, ha. Yes it feels that the context must give iron clad certainty as to the intention with the opposites - otherwise there could have been some terrible outcomes to yelled instructions in the heat of battle!
Hopefully history has knocked the corners of those situations, ha, ha.
I wouldn’t worry - the supposed north/south divide is not nearly as clear-cut as is popularly made out, and it’s really much more of a continuum Loads of native speakers in Mid-Wales use words that are ‘officially’ North alongside words that are ‘officially’ south. In my village they ALL used mas for out, and also (nearly) ALL used ise (= isio) for want.
You’ve answered your question in those words of yours there - it’s not really a ‘problem’, and doesn’t need avoiding.
It’s like German Sie sind and sie sind, which sound identical in speech, and mean respectively you are and they are.
Our brains cope well with ambiguity - and there are few examples in most languages anyway. I can think of one or two in English, where one really wouldn’t know exactly what was being said:
She can’t bear children. Visiting professors can be boring.
My advice is: don’t lose sleep over occasional ambiguities in language.
I don’t know about Welsh, but I’m pretty sure ambiguity is of the main reasons why many Italians think that people in Britain pretend not to understand when we speak English.
In Italian, you can pronounce a word in a real weird and wrong way, but it’s still quite easy to recognize.
In English, if you change a tiny bit of the pronunciation of a vocal, you end up saying a totally different thing (with often hilarious results - as I clearly remember from my own experience).
We’re not used to deal so much with ambiguity and the need to rely on subtle sound differences and context.
And especially in a language that’s pronounced by native speakers themselves in a million different ways.
Wow how interesting!..make the vowel sounds consistent in English and you have something which sounds like a completely different language! (The build up is done well isn’t it!)
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