cant y cant means 100%
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great thanks. I was over thinking it!
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There’s a great book aimed at learners called ‘cant y cant’ by the way. 100 articles all with 100 words with a handy word guide at the bottom of every page. It’s a nice introduction to reading Welsh and has absolutely nothing at all to do with this thread.
Thank you.
As you were.
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Hello, I am doing a masters degree and I am wondering if anybody would be willing to fill in a questionnaire? The questions are around Welsh Charities and will take less than 5 minutes would be an amazing help.
Thank you in advance!
I guess native English speakers might not even notice this, considering that vocals in English are pronounced in a different way each time anyway. 
But today, when I heard and read “hunain” I wondered:
why is the same sound written in two different ways?
Is there a subtle difference between “i” and “u” that I cannot perceive?
Or any sort of “rule” - to make it easier to remember how to write words, for example?
It’s the speed of speech that makes a difference here.
Hun is pronounced hee-n
-ain is eye-n
Together they should be “hee-neye-n”
But sound more like “hinine” most of the time.
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My understanding (which could be wrong) is that there is a subtle pronunciation difference in some areas in Wales between the “u” and the “i” that is hard to notice unless you are looking for it. Something like the “i” is pronounced more clearly like “ee” (as in “between” in English) and the “u” has a more cloudy sound a little like the German “ü” (u with an umlaut).
As I said, I could be wrong . . .
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Well…uh…thanks. But I guess I don’t know English well enough to understand the difference! 
Does it mean “eye” would be longer, like with a pause before the “n”?
Or is it the “hee” that is longer?
I realize now that the “n” in the end is a bit confusing (for me).
Another example: “dibynnu”.
I hear “dibenni” in Italian sounds, or (I guess) “de-ben-ny” in English.
(in both, the “e” is a bit more like French “e”, that’s how “y” usually sounds to me in some cases…in others, more like an “i” but I’ll leave this debate for another time!)
What am I missing? 
Thanks. I remember I heard someone mentioning differences like in North and South (or even more specific areas, I can’t remember).
In this case, I really can’t hear anything close to the German “ü”. Maybe it depends on the accent, or maybe it’s my ears that cannot notice the subtle differences - I can’t tell!
I really wouldn’t worry about this one or the other tiny nuanced ones. If you came to Wales as an Italian person speaking Welsh, then no one is going to notice. It is interesting to see Welsh pronunciations, explained with English spellings to an Italian though - I can see why linguists have invented their own univeral methods.
There is a difference between hunain and hunan, but it won’t make any difference to understanding at all.
I remember having the French au dessus and au desous explained to me at school. The prinounciation to me is very subtle, but to the French would be big and the meanings are quite different whereas the hunan-hunain differences are just as slight, but won’t cause any confusion.
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OK – there are two different things here about the y that are getting a bit mixed up. One is how it sounds in different syllables, the other is how it sounds in different areas/accents.
So: in a final syllable, and in most monosyllables (but not some unstressed ones, like y ‘the’ and yn ‘in’, etc.) a written ‘y’ sounds like a written ‘u’. Whether or not that is exactly the same as a written ‘i’ depends on the area/accent (see the next bit). In non-final syllables, like the middle of dibynnu, and in those unstressed monosyllables, it sounds like the English word a, or the final syllable of a German word like Wache: it’s a sound that doesn’t really exist in Italian, a sort of neutral, middle-of-the-mouth, not-quite-anything sort of vowel that linguists call ‘schwa’.
As for the accent thing: people generally say that in South Wales the ‘i’, ‘u’, and ‘clear y’ sounds are all the same – somewhere between an English short ‘i’ and an Italian ‘i’ depending on length/stress. In some areas in the North, it’s just ‘i’ that sounds like that, while ‘u’ and ‘y’ are pronounced with the tongue slightly lower and further back into the mouth. That’s the one that’s supposed to sound like a German ü, although to be honest the difference is more slight/subtle than that – it’s more like halfway between an Italian ‘i’ and a German ‘ü’. I think linguists represent it with a kind of barred ‘i’ symbol [ɨ], but the best way to get it is going to be to listen to someone you know to have a really strong North-Welsh accent and try to imitate what you hear.
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Although I agree with almost all of what m’colleague above has written, I would very respectfully take issue with his last point 
(although I’ve seen the same basic point made before by others).
It could be that many English speakers, especially in the south (of England) pronounce the English word “a” (indefinite article) as a ‘schwa’, I don’t think everyone does. Perhaps it gets less like that the further north you go (and I was brought up by northern (English) parents, so perhaps my "a"s are slightly influenced by that. (And I am not talking about when the indefinite article is emphasised, as it is sometimes; I’m talking about the general unemphasised “a”).
…
hmm…I just tried a little experiment with my better half. She was actually born in the north and has lived there, so I thought it would be a good test. I gave her a short passage to read, and at first I thought she had proved me right, as her “a” sounded much more “open” than a schwa.
But then we realised she’d read it slowly, and when she read it quickly, it sounded exactly like the vowel sound in unstressed “the”, i.e. schwa. Collapse of stout party.
I think it is fair to say though, that the exact vowel sounded for the word “a” by English speakers in England varies slightly depending on speed of speech, and whether any emphasis is put on it.
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Yes, that’s true, I will try to remember it - even though I’m charmed by sound nuances and can’t help being picky about them!
I’m glad to hear that in Welsh nuances are not as relevant as in French.
However, these days I listened a little bit of radio and TV (actually Cat and Nicky - mentioned in another thread in this Forum), and I noticed this:
probably because I’ve been listening to songs for quite a few years, and tried to repeat the sounds (and even transcribed a few in an odd Italian-English-Welsh mix) I’m able to recognize many more “chunks of sounds” than those I can understand. I don’t know what they mean, but I know that they’re words or sequences that must mean something, if they appear so often!
I was thinking that if I could figure out how they are written I could try and find them in the dictionary and build some vocabulary quite easily. Unfortunately, this is not easy at all!
This reminded me a story related to the band I named a lot already, but I think it’s a very good example:
I first heard about them in 1995, when a British guy I was talking to mentioned a favorite band of his. What I heard was “datbloggy” or “datblogy”.
Now, I dare you to figure out that those sounds could ever be spelled “datblygu” in any language of this planet!
it took years to find them.
Even now that Google is much better than 90s search engines, it’s not so good with Welsh.
So when I recognize a sound (in a tv or radio show, for example), I first try to find a match in a dictionary. If I don’t find anything, I try to google all the possible spellings I can think of - but most of the time I get no results.
This is why I thought maybe if I can understand the subtle differences better, I can figure out how the spelling more easily and I can find more of them, and this is why I’m asking!
Talking about “y” - I see there’s already slightly different opinions between @RichardBuck and @mikeellwood and I suspect it’s not going to be an easy task. 
I’m using songs of which I have transcriptions, to figure out sounds. From previous answers I can pretty much say that the accent I’m hearing is Southern. Now, picking a few random words as example, what I hear is:
“y” = pretty much “i” (and also “u” in Southern Welsh?) in pwynt, achwyn, arswydo, gyd, dyn, byd, wyth, sydd, gwangwyn, “wyd” in bywyd
y = something between to “e” (as in “je”) and a bit of “a”/schwa in y, dibynnu, jyst, “ydig” in ychydig, “byw” in bywyd, tymer
y = as above, but a bit more like a French “u” (as in “un”) in yn, yr, hyn, “ych” in ychydig
y = no sound in “rhywbeth” (I basically hear “roobeth” - also in challenges!) and wythnos
Does it make sense? 
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Hi @ffion-roberts
If you could give me a little more information about this, I’d be happy to mention it in tomorrow’s weekly newsletter, but I would need to say which university you’re associated with and which department, just for data protection purposes.
Dee
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Hello Dee,
Of course. In currently doing a Masters at Cardiff University in Public Relations and Communications. The questionnaire is completely anonymous and no personal information is collected.
Thank you very much,
Ffion
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I tried to do this, but since I don’t use Facebook and have never donated to a charity on line or read any charity things on line, I couldn’t complete it - some of the not relevant to me boxes showed up red saying an answer was required. Maybe a box for people who don’t interact at all might give you another statistic worth having?
That all looks pretty accurate and suggests to me you have no problem with your ears! (When you said ‘e’ I wasn’t thinking of French ‘je’, but it’s exactly the same kind of sound.)
I think sometimes the schwa-y sounds to me a bit more like a Southern English ‘u’ as in ‘up’ (i.e. mynnu sounds like ‘money’), but that may depend on the speaker, or on me as a listener trying to put sounds into boxes that are familiar to me.
I hadn’t thought about all those examples where a written ‘y’ isn’t pronounced at all – I think rhywbeth varies with the speaker (I’ve seen it on social media spelt wbath!), and you can add gwybod – but you’re absolutely right 
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Like the time I asked - further to a conversation we had been having about classical music - (I as guest 17 year old in the house of my sister’s French friend, and in front of her husband and young children at the dinner table) how to say the other part in a string quartet besides “les violons et la violoncelle” (violin and ‘cello)… was to play viola “jouer de la viole”? say I…
Aaagh!
Very strange quizzical to disbelieving look on face of this person, a grown up of thirty or even a few years older, and shocked faces all round the table.
“La viole” means ‘rape’, of course… most embarrassingly. Playing the “viole” even stranger… It took her a moment or two, plus my deep blush, to convince her it was an innocent enquiry. I wished the ground might swallow me up, but we were in an apartment a few floors up…
“Un alto” is a viola, and a viola player an “altiste”…
(From school I knew alto from choir parts, as opposed to sopranos/trebles.
Otherwise, I always thought that referred to the alto recorder rather than the treble or bass recorder, ‘cos a recorder or two & some early & baroque & classical sheet music was what my father treated himself to, with what he might have spent on tobacco for the pipe he had had to give up, and the music shop in Derry found other amateur musicians to help cobble together a music session of a Sunday afternoon, us pre-schoolers kept out of the living-room till tea and biscuit tray meant the door was open and the battle for kid-free zone was lost…It was a short phase, but the music sheets were always around the house after, till my musical brother took them.)
I
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OOps!
And sure, realizing the sweet host family believe you’re a horrible maniac…is definitely a bad moment.
Actually I’m sure any Italian, including myself, would have said the same as you; “alto” here refers to the saxophone, never strings.
Luckily in my host family in England the only mistake that was remembered through years is innocently funny. I said we reached England on an “hoovercraft”. 
By the way there are several combinations of Welsh words that sound a bit odd and funny in Italian…so there’s a whole universe of hilarious things that can happen when speaking different languages!
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how would I ask something of a friend like: “where did you grow up?” as opposed to “o ble wyt ti’n dod?” or are they the same thing? Thanks!